The nature of the press and its ravenous appetite for a “story” makes it likely that before you hear a single plaintive note of Elvis Perkins and his debut album, “Ash Wednesday,” you will know more about his parents and their own tragic stories. Of course, these were no ordinary American lives: His father was the film star Anthony Perkins, best known for his starring role in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” and his mother was the noted actress and photographer Berry Berenson, who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

But let’s rewind. Born in New York City in 1975, Mr. Perkins moved with his family out to California at the age of 4, where he was exposed to the weird, delusional world of Hollywood.

“Going to sets early on gave me some vision into the strangeness of it all,” Mr. Perkins said in a phone conversation as he and his band prepared for a swing of dates through the Northeast, including a night at Brooklyn’s Luna Lounge on Sunday. But such a perspective didn’t inoculate him against its allure. “I still am susceptible to the power of Hollywood and all that it represents and puts forth. It’s a powerful entity.”

Throughout his life, Mr. Perkins has alternately moved with and against the force of the Factory of Dreams. Though raised within its epicenter, he always felt a certain disengagement from its machinations. “I never felt part of that whole scene and I don’t think my father felt all that part of that scene either. So I think of myself as a stranger in a strange land when it comes to Hollywood.”

Such separation didn’t save Mr. Perkins, his older brother Osgood Perkins, and his mother from getting caught up in the whirlwind of press when his father passed away from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992. And of course, it wouldn’t be the last time tragedy struck the family. Berenson was on board American Airlines Flight 11, one of the two planes that struck the World Trade Center on September 11.

“Ash Wednesday,” Mr. Perkins’s stark, mature debut, grapples with such painful mortality and loss across its 11 songs, each seeming to inform the others to create an organic whole. The opener, “While You Were Sleeping,” is a slowly picked meditation on dream states that gathers steam even as the lyrics invoke a collapsing of time akin to a movie montage. In the time it takes to blink, children grow up, worlds burn, the heavens collapse, and a lifetime of memories pile up as if in a near-death experience. Mr. Perkins delivers all of these stark, somber images in a quivering drawl informed equally by Rufus Wainwright and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, as brushed drums and an understated accompaniment of horns accrue around him.

On the shuffling, shimmering “Sleep Sandwich,” he sings of science-fiction movies, time machines, starlets, and Los Angeles smog. Another song, “It’s a Sad World After All,” sharply undercuts the plasticized, Disney-fied worldview. Although his songs conjure up such celluloid images and strong visual acumen, Mr. Perkins swears he doesn’t write “cinematically.”

“By the time we actually went into the studio, the songs were well into themselves, knowing what they were, and what they wanted to be,” he said. “We aimed to put them down in a faithful way without getting too much in the way.”

Working together with his brother Osgood behind the drum kit and good friend Ethan Gold, both producing and assembling on-the-spot arrangements, there was great attention paid to acoustic warmth and capturing room sound. Mr. Perkins says their main concern was “just the songs breathing, so we chose to make it a real natural endeavor and use live takes for the vast majority of the record.” Glockenspiel, piano, singing saw, and harmonium round out the instrumental palette and help to provide the stately, processional feel to much of the record. But while the album centers around the title track and album closer, “Good Friday,” it’s presumptuous to read too much into its Catholic calendar. “I was raised Episcopalian,” Mr. Perkins says, but is quick to add that his mother still kept Catholic iconography around their house.

Berenson’s presence can be felt throughout the album, but it shouldn’t be misconstrued as simple therapeutic exercise. “Making this record was so sprawled out over such a long time … that I wasn’t really too sensitive or aware of it being any sort of singular cathartic experience,” Mr. Perkins said. “Once the songs were written, the task ahead of us was to put it down.”

If it sounds simple, it was anything but. Recording for more than a year before shopping the product around to record labels for equally as long was far from Mr. Perkins’s ideal. “We hoped to do it like [the Van Morrison classic] “Astral Weeks” in three days,” he said. “But that didn’t happen for us.”

Mr. Perkins will perform Sunday at Luna Lounge (361 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn). Call Ticketmaster for ticket information.