Outside Johnny Brenda’s—a toddler of a small rock club that sprang up two years ago in a dive bar in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood—late at night, it’s easy to spot Kurt Vile. Long, wavy hair obscures his face and his manic movements draw your eye. Tonight, I watch as Vile walks in and out of the club. He sends a text, spots me, and bounds over.

“Remember when you interviewed me, and you asked me if I listen to BC Camplight and I said ‘no’?” He laughs. He’s currently trying to get into the band Audible’s record release show, featuring BC Camplight, a piano pop and vocal harmony phenomenon in the vein of Brian Wilson and Elton John. Vile texts to see if anyone can get him on the list—the bass player for Vile’s brother band, the War on Drugs, is also BC Camplight’s bass player—and then darts off into the night before he can be retrieved from the sidewalk.

Vile’s not just antsy because it’s Friday night or because he’s desperate to see BC (he’s not), he also has news. What Vile just spilled gleefully to me, out there amongst the dozens of Philadelphia musicians dripping with desperation for their own shot at success, is that after months of entertaining, negotiating, and deliberating, he’s finally found a new home at Matador Records. And, he tells me, I can print that because he signed the papers that day. A few days later, before I can even put words to paper, the news is everywhere: “Kurt Vile Signs to Matador.”

Vile is one of what I like to call “the good guys.” One of the musicians from my hometown of Philadelphia that I really, truly feel deserves the success he’s finding. Being a band from Philly can easily become a theme in the career of a musician that comes up in the city’s scene, because it’s so small. If the scene doesn’t support you, you fail. But Vile’s experiences as a Philly musician have been positive, mostly because of his independent spirit and uniquely haunting, smothered folk sound.

“I’ll say I feel I benefit from Philly more than other people. My family is here and I have lots of friends. It’s close enough to New York and it’s not super busy,” Vile theorizes. “It gives you time to focus on your own thing and perfect it. When the time comes, you can go to New York where the action is. I love going up there but bands get swallowed up there. In Philly, there’s a wildly concentrated scene and a lot of like-minded people are there to support and nurture your style.” There are quite a lot of people that have really great taste there, and a lot of fellow bands to support each other. Of course, that can also breed competition, but Vile has managed to avoid that. He’s thrived.

Vile’s Constant Hitmaker—a best-of collection of his earlier songs released last spring via micro-label Gulcher—could be considered eponymous. He has been earning his nickname as “Philly’s Constant Hitmaker” for the past six years by releasing increasingly popular CD-Rs of his home-recordings. Sprawling, organic, noise-soaked, and ambitious from the onset, Vile’s CD-Rs found him a strong following in the DIY scenes of the East Coast. They also earned him the strange honor of creating what is essentially a greatest hits record before he’d ever even been on a label.

The last time Vile and I spoke before our club run-in was at South By Southwest, two weeks after we sat down for the interview for this article. I saw him there with his band, the Violators, at the Music Gym, stuffed into a tiny back room, blowing the ceiling off the building with three guitars, a sampler, and drums.

A chubby schlub from the audience who’d been going apeshit since Vile arrived, hollered something barely comprehensible about killing babies while listening to Vile’s music. One of the Violators immediately took to the mic to offer a disclaimer that enjoying Vile’s music does not include the killing of babies. Vile smirked and mumbled through his thick veil of curls, “It could, man. It could.”

It almost seems untimely to talk about Constant Hitmaker now, with all the buzz surrounding Vile’s sign to Matador and more recent releases, but it’s Hitmaker that broke him through, and it will be an important piece of his history once new fans start to pile on.

The idea for Constant Hitmaker came when Vile was introduced to the folks at Gulcher through a friend. He had already written a brand new full-length, but he saw an opportunity in Gulcher’s size and simplicity. As Vile told me in March, “[Gulcher] was a small label, and I knew they could put me out fast, so I gave them a lot of my older shit. I pretty much gave that to them because I didn’t want to give up the new stuff.” The plan worked. Constant Hitmaker slowly grew Vile’s profile and most likely greased the wheels for the Matador deal.

Vile chose the songs for Constant Hitmaker without label input at first, delivering a fully curated, well-sequenced album to Gulcher, but then second-guessed his choices. “We do a lot of back and forth,” he admits. “It was like my first release, so I was paranoid and changing it a lot.”

Vile feared his older, noisier, more lo-fi songs would sound too harsh to new listeners, especially since Constant Hitmaker would include a cleaned-up version of “Freeway”, produced by Philadelphia studio whiz Brian McTear. “I was thinking certain parts were too raw and weird. We finally put it out the way I gave it to them originally, and they basically won in the end,” he jokes.

It seems like “cleaning up” Vile’s music while keeping its charm intact would be an impossible project. Especially when considering that much of his older CD-R work was unmastered and uncooked. But Vile seems unafraid of taking his music to a higher-tech plane. “It’s all a learning process and you learn what to leave in,” he explains of mastering his songs. “Once I can go into the real mastering, then they really do make it sound better. Even if it’s weird and raw, you can still do stuff to make it sound good without necessarily cleaning it up.”

In point: The McTear version of “Freeway” is one of Vile’s best songs. Both the acoustic version and the re-recorded track are contained on Constant Hitmaker for comparison, with the newer version leading off the album. McTear’s version of “Freeway” jangles and sparkles with tasteful instrumentation as Vile hoots and howls with a faraway-sounding happiness reminiscent of early Bruce Springsteen recordings. His frenetic energy is channeled on the track rather than constricted. The original song, “Freeway in Mind”, closes out Constant Hitmaker as a medley with “Classic Rock in Spring.” The track consists of strummed guitar and deadpan, stoic vocals crinkling with static. It’s a beautiful, almost mournful song, and the palpable difference between this restrained tune and the more vital studio recording is fascinating. Vile is right that, with the right process, nothing is lost from his songwriting. In fact, many things are found.