Late at night, after his wife and his two teenage daughters go to bed, Kurt Vile heads down to the recording studio he built in the basement of his house in Philadelphia. He calls it OKV Central — “OKV” stands for Overnite Kurt Vile — and he rolls with the flow from midnight to 3 a.m.

“I get a lot of my KV world and my KV mind together around then,” Vile said as he showed me around the rooms stuffed with analog audio gear, instruments, amplifiers, effects pedals, stacks of cassettes and paperback biographies of his musical heroes. “I’ll be staying up late listening to whatever, you know. Recording loops on the fly. Songs come to me.”

Vile, 46, is the slacker poet of modern indie rock, with a clean guitar sound and conversational lyrics. He is a shy man who, until recently, had a habit of hiding himself from concert audiences behind his long mop of hair. On a warm afternoon in May, he seemed to be doing his best to be outgoing in the hours we spent together.

He started out more than 25 years ago, making bedroom recordings and passing out his homemade CD-Rs to fellow music nerds. In the 2010s, he graduated to professional recording studios, releasing low-key underground hits like “Pretty Pimpin’” and an offbeat album of duets with the Australian singer Courtney Barnett. He earned favorable comparisons to older artists like Neil Young and gained fans among younger artists like Role Model.

Vile’s new album, “Philadelphia’s been good to me” (Verve Records), which comes out May 29, was largely made here in the basement with his band, the Violators. The bassist, Adam Langellotti, set up the equipment, including a vintage mixing board Vile scored from the R.E.M. producer Mitch Easter.

“I’m really coasting at home, self-producing, hanging out with my friends,” he said.