Brian Halloran has given his seventh album a title with a grudge in it. Marauder (That Was Once Joy) raises an awkward question about what happens to the things we once enjoyed. Ageing, desire and regret are his subjects; kindness is among his proposed responses.

He produced the fifteen-song collection himself, bringing in musicians and singers from his New York circle. I’m more interested in hearing him wrestle with an uncomfortable feeling than in hearing advice about living well. His best writing gets into the first of those situations; the broader messages occasionally leave me admiring the intention and waiting for a sharper lyric.

Start with the title. A marauder is someone who shows up afterward and takes what remains, and That Was Once Joy reads like an epitaph for whatever got carried off. Time is the marauder, and the whole record is written by someone who noticed and decided against a tantrum. He just keeps writing melodies. I like that. Less drama, more observation.

Halloran produced it himself and Ricky Watts mixed it. It sounds warm and lived-in, with no gloss and no attempt to turn a club band into a stadium act. The room is full of people from his local scene: Rodney Flood on drums, Zack Zaro on guitar, Nicholas Trautmann on bass, TJ Viola on keys, and Kacie Sky, Steph Hurley and Natalie Colton on vocals. The backing vocals work as their own instrument, and you can hear that these people have played together for years rather than trading files across town.

The Feeling opens as a statement of purpose: he’s glad something inside is still burning. It starts slow, the piano comes in, and the guitar solo near the end lifts the whole thing to where it was always headed. Good opener, because the album’s subject is named in the first few minutes. Kind follows with acoustic guitars and stacked harmonies, and its entire pitch is “I’d like to be nicer.” On paper that’s a greeting card. In the song it lands because Halloran sings it like a man who hasn’t always managed it. Put Kind first and I’d have winced. After The Feeling it earns its place.

Contrition, co-written with Jes Hudak, rests on the vocal. Songs about apologizing tend to sound either staged or evasive, and this one avoids both. Radio, from Grey Revell, is the most straightforward mid-tempo rocker here, and the outside authorship doesn’t stick out. For someone who writes nearly everything himself, inviting other writers in is a risk, and it pays off.

Then come the tracks I’d actually return for. Lighthouse Head is my pick of the record, and I hear Depeche Mode in it. It’s the temperament rather than any quotation: restrained and a little cold, with feeling delivered through rhythm rather than volume. For a guitar guy this is a sideways step, and it sounds natural rather than like a detour for variety’s sake. I’d happily hear a whole album in this mode.

Missus got me even harder. There’s U2 in the air, specifically the stretch when they worked with Brian Eno and learned to sound like a space instead of four people with instruments. It isn’t imitation. It’s a shared way of looking: a big resonant room, a slow build, a song that seems to stare at the horizon. This is where Halloran feels most at ease, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Missus is the way plenty of people get into the record.

On the livelier side, A Time, A Time and Trying to Write the Movie play the same trick. The guitars bounce along cheerfully while the lyrics say life is rushing past and you can’t catch your breath even in the good moments. Bright music, anxious words, and that gap is where the album’s nerve lives. The title Trying to Write the Movie is dead on, since everybody is busy drafting the plot while the credits roll. Fool in October is the quietest and most autumnal thing here. Keys, nylon-string guitar, ghostly harmonies, and Halloran sings as if he’s talking to himself. It’s the closest he gets to really getting under your skin.

Now the complaints, because without them this would be a press release. Fifteen tracks is too many for this tone. There’s one subject, which is age, loss and the effort to do better, and over that distance the repetition is hard to miss. Late in the record I caught the melodies blurring together. Twelve or thirteen songs would have made a sharper album. And Halloran can be too tidy. The vocals are measured, the harmonies are built carefully, and sometimes I wanted something to crack. A record about tiredness and regret has a lot of order in it.

If you like grown-up melodic rock where the lyrics matter as much as the guitars, go for it. If you grew up on U2, Depeche Mode and the British school where mood outranks volume, there’s a good chance a few of these will stay with you. For me it’s Missus, Lighthouse Head and Fool in October.

I’m most attached to the album when the expression has a bit of uncertainty in it. Halloran has a direct way of stating what matters to him, and some of those statements can be very familiar. The precise moment of wondering whether he can still feel something gives the larger subjects a person to follow. Hearing the piano and guitar open out around that thought is what stays with me alongside my immediate affection for “Missus”. The playing gives the doubt an energetic answer. That’s a persuasive reason to hear a guitar solo on a record about getting older: somebody still has a reason to get carried away.

The album, Marauder (That Was Once Joy), lands on October 23.