The Maryland resident’s second album with D.C.-based collaborator J. Forté, Supersonic Sons, comes out Oct. 14, and the first song released — the bouncy, percussive “Cabin Fever” — is the perfect entry point for a concept album about an intergalactic explorer.

Not only does it tell the story of a bummed-out space traveler and fit within the album’s overall narrative, but it also has another meaning for the duo: Forté had been working from home at the time of writing lines like “The pressure’s building on the outside/The pressure’s building on the inside.”

“I thought he wrote the song about being trapped in his apartment, teleworking, and how he just wanted to not be teleworking,” Gendron says. It was unintentional, but Forté acknowledged later that the thematic overlap made sense, Gendron says.

In the same way that astronauts have to improvise to meet certain challenges, Sun Machines was the result of some adaptation. Gendron has been a rock drummer much of his musical life. But after resettling in Japan around 2010, that had to change.

“It was so silly — I brought my drums to Japan with me,” he says. “Like, in hindsight, like, what did I think I was gonna do with those drums?” The combination of paper-thin walls and the fear of disturbing neighbors severely limited his instrument options. So he started playing around with synths, guitar, bass and programmed drums.

He returned to the U.S. and formed Sun Machines — initially as a home-studio-only project — with Forté. They wanted to record something entirely on tape. And at first, they were swapping ideas via analog tapes. Eventually modern technology — iPads and the like — found its way into their arsenal.

The songs that Gendron had worked on while in Japan didn’t actually make it on the band’s first album, Human Subjects. They were set aside in favor of a slightly different path. But when it came time to make Supersonic Sons, he came to the table with loads of pre-formed ideas. All said, about half the tracks off Supersonic Sons are versions of what one could call Gendron’s “Japan songs.”

“It’s amazing that it’s all pretty cohesive,” Gendron says, reflecting on the gap between songs written in a foreign land, half a decade ago, and those written more recently.

Though living in Japan was really cool, Gendron says, it’s always a bit weird to start over somewhere else.

“I’m realizing that maybe, over there, I kinda felt like a space traveler or, you know, an alien,” he says.

Likewise, when explaining his time in the Navy — where actual astronauts remarked on how similar the submarine was to a spaceship — he notices the running thread.

“I don’t know if that also influenced my ideas — like getting in a capsule and kinda going and disappearing for extended periods of time,” he says. “I never even really gave that much thought, but I think that probably had something to do with it, too.”

“It’s kind of hard to play acoustic drums in my surroundings here,” says the 37-year-old Silver Spring resident, “let alone someplace with even more space [restrictions].”

When Gendron returned to the U.S., he immediately pulled out the instruments he hadn’t touched in a long time. “When I got back, I had started tinkering around with home recording some more, and I got all my stuff out of storage — a bunch of instruments and equipment that I hadn’t seen in years — and one of the items was my old Tascam 414 analog cassette tape recorder.”

Gendron — a big fan of tapes who had dabbled in home recording while in Japan — turned to longtime collaborator J. Forté (Lejeune, Secret Pop Band, Light Arms) for help. “I asked, ‘Are you interested in passing tapes back and forth?'” Gendron says. He recorded some drums, gave Forté the recording, then Forté put down bass, passed it back, and so on. Gradually, their recordings became a full-length, Human Subjects. Released in limited quantities on cassette, it marks the debut of Forté and Gendron’s duo, Sun Machines.

Originally, Sun Machines wanted Human Subjects to be built entirely on the idea of passing tapes back and forth. But Forté’s musical experiments with his iPad yielded a new approach: Side A for rock songs, and Side B for electronic songs.

“Mono Mind,” track No. 7 on Human Subjects, falls into the electronic category. “I got the drum loop and the synth part from [Forté], and I just put my headphones on and did that tribal thing with the toms and rolling around the kit,” Gendron says.

After several seconds of tumbling, polyrhythmic bliss, synth sounds envelop the listener, closing in ever-tighter circles. “The song itself is about anxiety,” Gendron says. “Just the two words ‘mono’ and ‘mind’ refer to tunnel vision — looped thoughts.”

“Mono Mind” also suits Human Subjects‘ overall themes of space, love and loneliness. The album’s story, Gendron says, concerns a guy who is recruited for a space mission and finds love. “By the time we get to ‘Mono Mind,’ the guy is already in space,” the musician says. But his protagonist’s voyage to the stars is a weighty one: He’s en route to the sun, tasked with sabotaging a mission. It’s enough to trigger the kind of anxiety that courses through “Mono Mind.”

But to Gendron, the song also comments on human nature — in all its foolishness. “It’s a bad idea for us to be traveling in space,” he says. “Humans belong on Earth. Like, what do we really want to know?”