Hamilton Leithauser, an Indie-Rock Hero in a Very Fancy Room

Even by Manhattan real estate standards, Café Carlyle is an intimate venue. The storied Upper East Side cabaret is just 988 square feet and seats 90 patrons, which means a performer can hear an audience member’s cutlery, not to mention their whispers.

When Hamilton Leithauser first played there in 2018, that cozy ambience posed an unexpected challenge: He had to be not just a performer, but also an entertainer. That meant talking to the audience, something he hadn’t been inclined to do when onstage as the frontman of the indie-rock doyens the Walkmen, who relied on reverberating guitars and clever wordplay to catapult to the forefront of the early 2000s New York music scene.

“People are right in front of you, and you want to talk to them between songs,” he said in a recent video interview. “I really wanted to let people in on what I was actually singing about, because I spend so much time on my words.” He’s been a fixture ever since.

Leithauser returns to the Carlyle this month for the seventh go-round of what’s become an annual residency (he missed a year during the Covid-19 pandemic), playing a slate of 15 shows from March 6-29. This time, he has a new album, “This Side of the Island,” to trot out too. Compared to his last few solo releases, “This Side of the Island” sounds a bit more frenetic and urgent, which he is aware will bring an interesting dimension to the snug confines of the Carlyle, which was bought by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts in 2001 for $130 million and regularly hosts artists like Isaac Mizrahi and John Pizzarelli.

“That room doesn’t see that much of that kind of music,” he said of his new songs. “I’ve got to do my own thing. I’m not ready to grow up fully, you know?”

For the record, Leithauser, 46, is married to Anna Stumpf, an audio executive with whom he occasionally performs, and is the father to two daughters. Still, the sentiment stands: Leithauser has built a successful career largely by following his own instincts.

Born in Washington to a mother who worked in social services at a college prep school and a father who was a curator at the National Gallery of Art, Leithauser was from a young age enraptured by the sounds of Billy Bragg, Roy Orbison and Morrissey. (He is certain he heard Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” in the womb.) He landed a summer gig at Virginia’s Inner Ear Studios, where he performed odd jobs, and in school received a crash course in music theory, singing in the glee club and scrutinizing the hymns in the weekly chapel sessions.

“That was when I learned to love deconstructing music, very mathematically,” he said. “Very not rock ’n’ roll.”

The rock ’n’ roll came in due time. In 1996, while still in high school in D.C., Leithauser and a few friends formed the garage outfit the Recoys. Leithauser moved north to attend Boston University, and the band put out a three-song EP before calling it quits. From there, Leithauser transferred to New York University because, he said, “I realized how many more opportunities there were for playing music.”

The move proved prescient: In 2000, Leithauser, together with the ex-Recoys guitarist Peter Bauer and a trio of musicians from the post-punk group Jonathan Fire*Eater, formed the Walkmen. Thanks to songs that were as literary as they were lo-fi, the Walkmen carved out a distinctive presence in a crowded rock revival landscape that included the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs — and unlike their many downtown- and Brooklyn-based peers, the Walkmen honed their sound uptown in a Harlem practice space.

Pitchfork praised the band’s first LP, “Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone,” as one of the year’s best. Its second, “Bows + Arrows,” earned it a guest spot on the teen drama “The O.C.” and a live performance on David Letterman’s late-night show. The band released five more records before announcing a “pretty extreme hiatus” in 2013. (The Walkmen returned to the stage in 2023, including a sold-out run at Webster Hall.)

Leithauser’s singing in the Walkmen was charmingly raw and ragged, a preacher delivering his lyrical sermons through a fuzzy microphone. But his work outside the band is something different: From his 2014 solo debut, “Black Hours,” onward, Leithauser showed himself to be a more expressive crooner capable of hitting the notes at both ends of the register. “There’s like a boldness to how he plays,” Aaron Dessner, a multi-instrumentalist in the National, said in a video interview. “Sort of a raw force.”

Dessner should know: He produced “This Side of the Island,” which is due Friday. Leithauser actually started writing and recording the album’s songs about eight years ago. “The piano and the guitar from the first song on the record, I literally recorded the actual tracks when Barack Obama was president of the United States,” he said of the opener, “Fist of Flowers.” But the album stalled; Leithauser was working on other projects, and he couldn’t decide whether the songs were finished. There’s more overt skepticism on the LP (“This side of the island is built out of trash, our love and our city were built to collapse,” he sings on the title track), and the production is more pronounced.

Leithauser asked Dessner, whom he’d known for over 20 years and who has recently become a key collaborator of Taylor Swift, to review the fruits of his labor. “I was mostly just blown away by what he had already done, to be honest,” Dessner said. All the producer needed was a few days in his upstate New York studio with Leithauser to add the flourishes that finally elevated the material to its finished state. “It really switched my perspective on everything and brought it into a much more modern environment,” Leithauser said. (For example, listen for the acoustic guitar on “Knockin’ Heart,” which Dessner suggested as a way to “help give more locomotion and bind it together,” as he put it.)

While “This Side of the Island” was simmering, Leithauser was exploring another creative outlet: scoring. He said he’s written around 30 different theme songs for podcasts. “I do hip-hop, I do old-timey,” he said. “They’re all over the map, and that’s the fun of it.”

In 2022, he also scored “The Last Movie Stars,” the Ethan Hawke-directed documentary series about the Hollywood power couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. In Leithauser, Hawke saw someone who could create a soundtrack that would be at once familiar and surprising — crucial for a show that spanned the 1950s to early aughts. “I didn’t want it to be trapped in some kind of ’50s sound or ’60s sound or ’70s sound,” Hawke said in a phone interview. “And I felt he could hold the whole thing together because there’s something outside of time about him.”

Count Hawke among the dozens of friends and fans who plan on paying the $200-plus dinner-and-show fee to watch Leithauser perform once again at the Carlyle. According to Marlene Poynder, the hotel’s managing director, Leithauser’s shows attract a younger and decidedly hipper horde than is typical for the 95-year-old hotel. Also, one more prone to imbibing: Whereas audience members on most nights will indulge in one martini, “the Brooklyn crowd is cocktail-forward,” Poynder said.

Not that Leithauser seems to mind. “You get the occasional really drunk friend screaming,” he said, “but they’re always supportive.”

Maybe the best perk of the whole affair: He and his family all stay in the hotel for free during his residency. “We did get a noise complaint last year during the show,” he said with a laugh. The culprits? His daughters and nieces. “They were up there eating candy and going absolutely berserk.”