Pop star is all Pink as new album proves a hit

Ariel Pink is craving a cigarette: it's the first thing he asks for when he arrives to talk about his new album, Pom Pom. A representative from his record label, 4AD, is dispatched to satisfy him.

While waiting for his cigarette, Pink paces around the back porch with his iPhone and tries to explain the virtual whirlwind that he has experienced in the months leading to the release of his third studio album for the label.

For the first time during the unveiling of an album, he has been "plugged into the world of first impressions" of those reacting to his 17-song work, he says. Filled with the artist's immediately identifiable lost-to-time pop songs, so strange and aggressively catchy, it's a singular work, an instant outre classic, and Pink has been in a social media wormhole exploring the reactions of those who have heard it.

The artist, 36, is witnessing the simultaneous ascent of his popularity and notoriety. The record's catchy first single, Put Your Number in My Phone, is a potent ear worm that revels in nostalgia. Rapper Azealia Banks has just covered his new Dada surf-pop song, Nude Beach a Go Go, on her new record, Broke With Expensive Taste. (She calls him Ariel Stink.) Breakout pop singer Charli XCX has tweeted her affection for Pom Pom.

But it hasn't all been roses. The artist, born in Beverly Hills as Ariel Rosenberg, has been mired in a lawsuit filed by an ex-band member claiming partial ownership of songs made by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, the name the artist used when releasing all of his work starting as a teen and stretching to 2012's Mature Themes.