When Ottoman Turks frontman and songwriter Nathan Mongol Wells steps outside of the band for his solo debut, From A Dark Corner, due out this year on State Fair Records, he doesn’t present as one of the characters from the Ottoman Turks’ uptempo songs — the conspiracy-poisoned uncle, the insecure southern bro, the apathetic rocker stuck in a perpetual party, or the vengeful corpse of JFK. Instead, Wells’ solo work feels more like it comes from the perspective of a man who spent all night arguing with those lunatics at a Dallas dive bar and just sat down in a quiet room of his house with a chilled glass of well tequila to quiet their voices in his head.

Beyond two wholly unique studio albums and 12 years worth of live performances numbering in the thousands, Ottoman Turks (Rolling Stone, Dallas Morning News) gave the world the solo careers of the band’s guitarist Joshua Ray Walker and bassist Billy Law. But the Turks are the brainchild of Wells, and while Walker went deeper into his country influences and Law put out a series of poignantly literal ballads, From A Dark Corner is the introduction to the man behind the Turks’ cinematic universe. Less raucous, but still packing the internal chaos of the characters he previously created (Walker, who co-produced the album with John Pedigo, describes the debut project as “fervorous”), From A Dark Corner is more autobiographical than Wells’ previous work.