The cover of Declan McKenna’s second album features a blurred photo of its 21-year-old author against a black background. He’s reaching out to the listener, casually dressed for an appearance on Top of the Pops at the height of the three-day week in 1974: his unzipped metallic jumpsuit sparkling in the soft lighting, its shoulders so exaggerated their outer limits are level with his mouth. McKenna’s look has approached glam before – a little eye makeup, nail polish and a hint of glitter on his face setting him apart from the massed ranks of youthful, earnest boy-next-door singer-songwriters – but this is something else. At first glance, Zeros looks as if it’s fallen through a time warp from 1974, more like a lost album rescued from obscurity by a specialist reissue label than the latest release from a very 21st century kind of artist whose music is beloved of TikTokkers in search of a soundtrack. (His debut single Brazil went silver without actually making the charts.)

You can see why McKenna might want to retreat into an alluringly glitzy past, and not merely because of his oft-expressed admiration for David Bowie. His rise was swift and impressive. He won Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Competition aged 16, and was signed by a major label shortly afterwards; Brazil, a song he’d written as part of his music GCSE, ended up in the US rock charts, and his debut album What Do You Think About the Car? cracked the UK Top 20. The caffeinated-but-glossy alt-rock it contained was very well reviewed, but his success came at a price. A series of songs that took hot-button topics as their subject – transgender suicide and the rightwing press’s attitude to immigration among them – got him labelled The Voice of a Generation or The Spokesman for Gen Z, two appellations you frankly wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Google his name and “voice of a generation” together and you get a succession of features from broadsheets, tabloids and the music press alike, all of them calling him it while he doggedly protests that he isn’t.

So Zeros largely leaves the topical songs behind in favour of something less on-the-nose. The lyrics feature some distinctly glam-era concerns – futuristic-sounding dystopias, intimations of imminent apocalypse (“the asteroid’s here!” runs the line that links the plangent verses of You Better Believe!!! to its epic chorus) and fabulous outsiders – albeit recast for a more modern era: the dystopia turns out to be everyday life in 2020, the apocalypse is environmental, the fabulous outsiders are struggling not with the greyness of suburban existence but with the pressures of social media. “Heaven knows you get so miserable you have to go – summertime in Cannes and Christmas Day in Borneo,” opens Sagittarius A*, Roxy Music-ishly, but the jet-setter it depicts isn’t just jaded, they’re contributing to global warming: “You think your money’s going to stop you getting wet.” It looks a bit clunky and finger-wagging on paper, but it’s actually well done: McKenna amping up the slightly sardonic Ray Davies-esque quality to his voice, wearily pleading: “Mother Nature, take a day off.”

If not every attempt at rebooting glam’s lyrical preoccupations works – occasionally the contemporary references to Nike trainers, Quavers or Twitter jar – McKenna’s efforts to do something similar with his music are more successful. The musical references stay the right side of pastiche. You can pick out the inspirations: the knowingly retro futurism of the synths on Twice Your Size, the ghost of Bowie’s The Bewlay Brothers lurking around the massed voices on Emily, the distinct hint of T Rex about the backing vocals and guitar solo on Be an Astronaut. But it never feels like he’s doing a straightforward impersonation or subsuming his own personality: it nods to the past, but nothing on Zeros sounds as retro as the cover looks.

Already skilled at writing melodies – for all the press’s concentration on his lyrics, the key selling point of What Do You Think About the Car? was that its songs were loaded with hooks, which also appear in profusion here – it feels like the work of an artist broadening his scope, colouring his sound with some well-chosen influences. Certainly, there was nothing on his debut album as ambitious as the dynamic shifts on Beautiful Faces or as impressive as Be an Astronaut, the latter Zero’s highlight. It’s a song good enough to get his musical idols nodding in appreciation, the tumbling, elegiac sadness of its melody scratching against the epic arrangement and the stirring don’t-let-the-bastards-grind-you-down theme of its lyrics. If he’s capable of writing stuff like this at 21 – and indeed of taking on the influences of the past without just regurgitating them – McKenna’s future looks intriguing. For the time being, though, he’s making the tricky business of shape-shifting and growing up in public seem painless.

This week Alexis listened to

JG: Love LUV
Forthcoming on Dutch label Puss, Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard floats a Shangri-Las sample over a delightful warm bath of electronics.