The One AM Radio dials up new lineup, new sound

“I tried doing it in New York,’’ he adds, “but it didn’t really work out.’’

Following on the heels of April’s “Heaven Is Attached by a Slender Thread’’ (on Dangerbird), Hirway brings his somber but openhearted electro-pop back to his home state on Tuesday, when his group plays the Brighton Music Hall. And it is, significantly, The One AM Radio’s first album and major tour as an actual group, rather than the ever-changing collection of friends surrounding Hirway on his first four releases.

Those lineups of convenience generated a mounting frustration. Whenever he’d pull together a new group of musicians to go on the road, says Hirway, “I would have to rearrange the song, have to re-figure out how I was going to play it and who was going to play with me and teach them how to do it. It was just a long process, and it got tiresome and also kind of lonely.’’

He eventually settled on a permanent lineup that includes guitarist Scott Leahy and keyboardist Fontaine Cole, but the loneliness remains. Look no further than “In a City Without Seasons’’; hooked by the line “It’s hard to measure time in a city you don’t believe in,’’ it’s not an especially arms-open love letter to Hirway’s new hometown. It turns out that the ambivalence comes not from him but from native Angeleno Cole. “She was saying that she has a terrible memory and she blames it on LA, that every day looks the same.’’ (Cole has relocated to San Francisco.)