“If you can go to the darkest corners of things, you can see how the world really works.” — Kye Alfred Hillig, Destruction Island

East of Bonney Lake on State Route 410 things begin to change. Traffic lightens. The tract homes dwindle. Mini malls and Starbucks disappear. You see firewood for sale — old boats, old cars, old tractors. You see Sarah Palin’s “real America.” You suddenly know you’ve left wherever you left from.

When it’s sunny, it seems wholesome, cheerful and lovely. But it can seem downright tragic in the rain. Picture December and the black, ragged trees, hopeless cows marooned in fields, the swayback mossy barns, the trailers and Datsuns and mailboxes in the mud.

Picture Buckley, hometown of Kye Alfred Hillig, singer and principle songwriter for Tacoma band Destruction Island, who will release their new 12-inch record Colonial Surf this weekend on stellar local label Rural Wolf. Gas stations and self-storage and used cars leading in, and then the steadfast brick downtown. Quiet streets, quiet houses, quiet people. Rain. Quiet or not-so-quiet desperation.

“It’s right between a town where a guy died fucking a horse and a town where some kid repeatedly shot a dog — with the same arrow,” says D.I. multi-instrumentalist Yos-wa, referring to Enumclaw and Wilkeson, respectively.

“Buckley’s a town with a lot of people who don’t have life figured out very well,” Hillig added during a sit-down with the band at Terry’s Office Tavern. And that’s just how he likes it.

Hillig, one of the best and most original lyricists T-town has to offer, is a glutton for the weird and the bleak.

“He’s always had that morbid curiosity,” says Yos-wa, who’s known Hillig since high school.

Hillig, who in person is warm and engaging, loves towns like Buckley and nearby Wilkeson, loves that strange, dark side of Northwest life. He named his band after a Washington landmark so-called in honor of two bloody episodes between explorers and Native Americans. He also purposely seeks out employment that exposes him to the sad, odd and macabre. Currently, he works at an institution for people with mental disabilities and disorders.

“If there’s someone in the world sticking a shoe up their ass,” he explains. “They’re there.”

But that’s nothing. In his old job doing trauma cleanup, he routinely picked up the pieces after suicides. Literally.

“If it’s a shotgun blast, you’ve gotta look everywhere,” he told me. “I once found an ear 20 feet across the room.”

Rather than make Hillig a pessimist, such experience has made him magnanimous. He sees the value in people through their failures, flaws and fears.

“If someone’s real, they’re good,” he says.

Same with songs, I would add. Hillig’s songs, like the characters in them, are unusually real and good. While the four-piece band steers deftly down Indie Road, turning the radio dial from rock to country to top 40, Hillig’s lyrics veer wildly, kicking up gothic gems: “I’ve got a couple questions for a happier man;” and “The thief that you are makes a billboard out of pity;” and “It’s a half a mile to hopeless but we’re well on our way;” and “John is scaring all the Peace Corps girls.” And many, many more.

The album’s title is meant to evoke “a village or a township,” according to the band — those euphemistically named subdivisions, trailer courts and apartment complexes that smear our landscape and shelter our frightening, frightened lives. The album, fittingly, serves the same function. Listening to it is like looking in the windows of the houses.

The arrangements on Colonial Surf, while impeccably crafted, sometimes miss the sweet rawness of the lyrics, and Hillig’s delivery sometimes sounds too much like Tracy Chapman for this listener. Still, I can’t get these songs or their denizens out of my head. In the end, Colonial Surf isn’t a record I’ll listen to every week, or even every month, but I’ll think about it often and hear it forever as the darkness grows constantly darker.

[The New Frontier Lounge, with Paris Spleen and guests, Friday, June 19, 9 p.m., 301 E. 25th St., Tacoma, 253.572.4020]

[Hell’s Kitchen, record release party with No-Fi Soul Rebellion, Peter Parker and The Apple War, Saturday, June 20, 5 p.m., $7, all ages, 3829 Sixth Ave., Tacoma, 253.759.6003]