“LUKAS GRAHAM”

Warner Bros.

What a nice guy Lukas Graham Forchhammer is — respectful toward his parents, hardworking, grateful to be heard. He’s the singer, lyricist and leader of a Danish band, Lukas Graham, that is releasing its American debut album with what’s already an international hit, “7 Years.” In that song, he cherishes his parents’ advice about how to get through the decades of life, mourns his father’s death and looks forward to children of his own.

It’s the kind of growing-up-and-aging-gracefully song that’s a country-music staple. But “7 Years” is placed instead where pop meets R&B.

The music, like much Scandinavian pop, ignores genre to draw on whatever works, current and vintage. It merges electronic dance music keyboards with Bee Gees falsettos in “Take the World by Storm,” puts an R&B croon atop hints of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata in “Better Than Yourself (Criminal Mind Pt. 2),” and looks back to 1970s and 1980s R&B in “Strip No More” and “Drunk in the Morning.”

But through most of the album, filial loyalty merges with humble-bragging — not only in “7 Years” but also in “You’re Not There,” another elegy for his father, and in “Mama Said,” a song about a non-affluent childhood that echoes (and credits) the chorus from “Annie” that Jay Z also used in “Hard Knock Life.”

Behind the modesty, though, is an equally determined sense of enterprise. “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout Me” starts with the piano and organ of an old-fashioned gospel song and turns into lilting, upbeat soul as Forchhammer sings about transcending sorrow via careerism. “A lot of people told me, when daddy passed away/Go take some time off, but I got no time to waste,” he sings. That’s a statement of priorities, a determined flash of candor.

— Jon Pareles,

New York Times