The members of the band Kill Henry Sugar, Erik Della Penna and Dean Sharenow, are born and bred New Yorkers, and their new album, “Swing Back and Down,” is an homage to the city. But Kill Henry Sugar’s music sounds more fit for a prairie wagon than a subway car. The theme is Gotham, but the sound is drums-and-Dobro — American roots. It’s as if a couple of talented, nostalgic, and cynical New Yorkers landed on the frontier and found the time to tell stories about their great city back east. It’s a beautiful thing to listen to coming from two men who were not only born in the Bronx, but recorded their album there. (Then again, the Bronx is the city’s last frontier.)

Mr. Della Penna is the duo’s songwriter, guitarist, and lead singer. He is a graduate of Mannes College of Music and has toured with major artists and written two children’s musicals. Mr. Sharenow is the producer, percussionist, and backing vocalist, and has engineered discs for David Sanborn, Aaron Neville, and Jonatha Brooke, and played drums on Broadway. The two formed Kill Henry Sugar in 1999, taking the name after a Roald Dahl story. “Swing Back and Down” is their fourth album; when Joan Baez heard an early version of it, she invited them on tour.

Kill Henry Sugar transforms the every day city-dweller’s experience into poetry as an outlet for the way Mr. Della Penna experiences the city himself.

“You hear your neighbors all the time, at least I do,” he said during an interview in his apartment on upper Central Park West, “And you eavesdrop and wonder: ‘Was that a cry of agony or ecstasy? Are those people having a fight or are they just joking around?’ It’s always, not upsetting, but shocking, in an internal way, to hear someone maybe arguing, or somebody’s life not going the way they want it to go.”

These observations are behind the song “Neighbors,” on which Mr. Della Penna sings of “unfamiliar flavors coming from the folks next door” and “brutal silence, might as well be twisting, violence isn’t very far.” The lyrics capture the alienation and humanity of close quarters, no more so than in the last line of the chorus, in which Mr. Della Penna sings tenderly, with Mr. Sharenow joining to harmonize in the final lines: “The voices of the neighbors are always there reminding me that other hearts are breaking too.”

The public rituals of the city are observed in the song “Puerto Rican Day Parade,” about the event Mr. Della Penna attends every year.

“I can’t not go — it goes in front of my apartment,” he said. But Mr. Della Penna is too subtle to use Latin beats. His tribute to tribal ritual is set to the melody of a country fair, which well conveys the spirit of the song: to show how in New York, “everybody’s very comfortable about being different and the same,” as he put it.

Mr. Della Penna points to a number of musical influences. His grandfather, an electrical engineer for the city, had a mandolin. His father, an artist, played “embarrassing jazz flute.” He has played with Irish, Latin, and Klezmer bands. Kill Henry Sugar recorded “Swing Back and Down” at Mr. Della Penna’s grandparents’ apartment in the East Bronx. The space was empty because his grandparents, who moved there in the 1950s, passed away a few years ago. Until he was 30, Mr. Della Penna, now 42, went there every Sunday for a big family gathering, at which his grandmother, Lucia, would serve salted fish and “lots of uncool meat,” such as veal.

These days, Mr. Della Penna takes his wife and two sons for real Italian suppers on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. The songwriting takes place at home.

“It happens in quick bursts until I look back and maybe enough stuff gets corrected and there’s a little song sitting there,” Mr. Della Penna said.

He is proud to be a bona fide New York musician. “Most of the people in the bands or musicians that I meet now who claim to be from New York aren’t from New York. They’re from Oberlin and now they’ve been here six months, and they’ve just got their hair cut like they’re in the Kinks, and they say they’re from Brooklyn. I feel justifiably crusty.”

He gets sentimental thinking about his New York heroes: Edgar Allan Poe, Irving Berlin, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, George Gershwin. “If we can just be in one square inch of the shadow of all these people who have lived here, and done things, then great,” he said. With their new album, Kill Henry Sugar deserves to get closer than that.

Kill Henry Sugar performs tonight at 10 p.m. at the Living Room (154 Ludlow St., 212-533-7235).