The leech scene from Stand By Me has been making me physically uncomfortable for twenty-five years. Every time Gordie says “Hey Vern, there’s something on your neck,” and the camera pans to the giant, gray, slug-like creature adhered to Vern’s flesh, I vocalize involuntarily and give a little shiver. I don’t know what the experience of having a leech stuck to you is actually like, but my brain has formed a pretty good guess, and having to rip a slimy, thumb-sized swamp creature off of my own tender skin has been one of my greatest fears since age six or so.

Of course, the movie isn’t really about leeches. At six, I was mostly missing the point. It’s not until you’re older that you understand what the characters are only beginning to: the creeping dread of adult life, which at twelve is just starting to wave a greeting from the edges of your consciousness.

“Rows Of Houses,” the lead single from Dan Mangan’s new album Oh Fortune, is about the film Stand By Me, and therefore is also about creeping adult dread. “The sight of Brower / The taste of something / The thought of houses / In rows of houses.” This coming-of-age song, buried at track nine, serves as both prologue and emotional centerpiece for Oh Fortune, an album far more grown up than Mangan’s previous work.

On 2009’s Nice, Nice, Very Nice Mangan was wry, observant, and sly, shining a merrily satirical light on the world around him. Now Mangan has turned his shrewd gaze inward, picking apart character flaws and personal foibles. He wastes no time: though the opening track “About As Helpful As You Can Be Without Being Any Help At All” disguises itself musically as a jaunty waltz, the lyrics are an unflinching accusation of self-destructiveness, ego, and martyrdom. “I lit up like a match ’cause I bled gasoline / Made a torch of myself ’til the moon was mine / Stars made of me.” It segues seamlessly into “How Darwinian”: “Like a dog at your feet / I will see the world the way that it seems easy to see.”

Fortunately, Mangan’s concerns extend beyond trying not to be an asshole. Oh Fortune’s real strengths lie in its explorations of the fears that all adults share, those the boys of Stand By Me first heard knocking: loneliness, worthlessness, death. “Oh fortune, bring fortune to spare.” Two songs - “Post-War Blues” and “Stars With Them, Ends With Us” - seem to touch on life during wartime, and two tracks reference death right in their titles.

Fittingly, the instrumentation on Oh Fortune is more sophisticated and complex than one might expect from Mangan, suddenly layered and noisy, more nuanced but also more assertively present than on Nice. Drums rumble like nervous stomachs and vocals echo like the voices in the back of your head. Songs flow into one another in eddies of fuzz. There are washes of anxiety and touches of sorrow, and elegant flourishes of beauty everywhere.

And I guess that’s as good a description of adulthood as anything.

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Oh Fortune is out now.

Dan Mangan plays the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver on November 9, and Alix Goolden hall in Victoria November 10.