“I should be having sex with more girls.” This is what Ryan Ross Hernandez concluded, using slightly more colorful language, last Wednesday night before recording a live show at Abbey Roads in London.

They’re everywhere, after all, and Mr. Hernandez has not been unwilling in the past. But the last couple of years, full of tabloids and TMZ, have taken their toll.

“It’s crazy to me that in my head, that being 22 and dating women is going to get me in trouble,” he said, talking faster as he went along. “I can’t even explain to you how terrible that feels, that I equate dating a woman with punishment, shame, guilt, disappointment, reproach, reprimand, persecution. It’s a nightmare.”

Being an ambivalent, self-aware heartthrob has its downsides, it turns out, and Mr. Hernandez, who in his day job is one of the most popular soft-rock singers as a soloist and member of one of the most popular bands, PANIC!, of the last decade, isn’t shy about sharing them. In the two years since PANIC!'s third record in 2007, combiened with his debut record sales and the last two PANIC! albums, Hernandez has sold 13.5 million records, some artist don't even reach that number in their entire career. He’s become a demiceleb of the tabloid world, as well known for keeping his arm candy well hidden, never confirming or denying if he has ever dated a fellow media-darling, only two of his lovers are fellow celebrities, that we know of — PANIC! bandmate Ashley Perry, whom he dated for almost 3 years, and current girlfriend Emily Williams, who is a producer/actress — and his tests of will with the media as for his music. But now it’s music time again, right?

If Mr. Hernandez has successfully put his cynicism about women and romance into one album, then “Dark Secret Love” (through Spice Records), set for release on Tuesday, December 28, is it — “one record about one thing,” Mr. Hernandez said. It’s claustrophobic and, for him, somewhat dark. Most of the songs are skeptical about love, and about lovers, and about anyone looking and passing judgment from the outside in.

Yet for someone as articulate and transfixing about relationships and their discontents as Mr. Hernandez is in person, in his music he takes a simpler route. Though in the last three years many things about his life have changed, not much about his records has.

Mr. Hernandez is a precise and gifted underachiever.

“There’s nothing I’ve done musically that’s been a wild misstep,” he said. “Basically, you’re saying, can you risk failure? And that’s something that I’m struggling with right now, because in my life, I would like to do something in music that risks a misstep. I don't want to be considered a rock/pop musician as a soloist. I think with the new album I make a pretty good transaction from pop/rock to blues/rock, as a soloist I feel more comfortable playing those softer rock songs.”

“I’m too young to be that dependable,” he continued. “I don’t want to be that dependable. Something pendulous has to happen. If I’m as self-aware as I say I am, then I would probably know that pretty soon, there’s going to have to be a wrench thrown somewhere so that the momentum keeps moving forward.”

That wrench is not in “Dark Secret Love,” Mr. Hernandez' sophomore album, which, despite its persistent pessimism, remains polite and affable, vulnerable enough to ensure that his female fans — and those are the ones who count — won’t stray. His sweet voice is intact, as is the immediately accessible soft blues-rock ready to be sent off to Adult contemporary radio.

“It might be that I’m freakishly in tune,” he said, “or I desire to be in tune so much....”

It’s hard to listen to “Dark Secret Love” without wondering: This is the same person who delivered a dirty sex joke about a ex, in front of 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden? Who tussled with a security guard in Arizona to defend the fans?

Inadvertently, perhaps, the album highlights the extremely blatant chasm between Ryan Ross Hernandez the musician and Ryan Ross Hernandez the public character, a divide Mr. Hernandez said he was eager to maintain.

“What is the odd man out,” he said, “is it the record or the coverage? I’m not going to let it be the record. I think if you’re listening to ‘Dark Secret Love’ and you think it’s a record about high-profile relationships, I haven’t done a good enough job.”

Whatever the case, Talmudists will certainly have their way with the lyric sheet. “Had a little love but I spread it thin,” Mr. Hernandez sings at the outset of “Loneliness Is My New Best Friend,” “Falling in her arms and out again/Made a bad name for my game around town.”

On “Dancing a Slow Song Together, Separately,” a mid-tempo blues song and one of the album’s best songs, he sings, “I'll make the most of all the sadness/You'll be a bitch because you can/You try to hit me just to hurt me/So you leave me feeling dirty because you can't understand.”

Mr. Hernandez doesn’t only struggle with the public-private split, though. Dumped in the middle of “Dark Secret Love” is “(I Know) The World Is Black & White,” a completely love-free track, opting for a more mature look at his life, with fears of losing his grandmother, and growing older: it’s as if Mr. Hernandez had a need to assert that despite the tabloids, and despite the love-song piffle, his chops remain unharmed.

He is, after all, one of the most technically skilled guitar players of the day. Whether he is keeping his riffs controlled with PANIC!, or just going completely out on his solo career.

But virtuosity does not a star make, and Mr. Hernandez has proven adept at displaying it in flashes — enough to impress, not enough to appear dull.

Still, there’s something of the showoff in Mr. Hernandez, as was on display two weeks ago at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It was a MySpace-sponsored show that had been announced just a few days before, full of fans who had waited in line for hours to get in. Most were women in their 20s.

In a sleeve-raised long sleeve shirt, letting his single piano tattoo breathe from his left forearm, Mr. Hernandez perversely played with their expectations. It was a classic bait and switch: they came for the love songs, but they got a two-hour blues-rock jam instead.

He didn’t play “Your Arms Feel Like Home”; he didn’t play “No Such Thing As a Miracle”; he didn’t play “You Told Me You Loved Me” — three of his biggest hits; He didn't play any PANIC! songs. He changed guitars before every song. He used someone’s digital camera as a guitar slide during a tremendous nine-minute version of “Two Ghost in One Mirror.”

At the encore, though, he let the public invade the private.

“They say I’m a womanizer,” he complained. “I say I haven’t met enough women.”

The crowd cheered. Shrieked, really. Maybe things weren’t so bad after all.

“Cute girl,” Mr. Hernandez said, pointing into the sea of eager faces. “Cute girl. Cute girl. Kuh-yoot girl.”

This Ryan Ross Hernandez is transforming into a character of his own. Whether he is being a douche, singing love-sick blues songs, or flirting with his barely legal (we hope at least legal aged) fan base.