It took two years, a dozen musicians and countless tanks of gasoline, but Boy Without God has finally completed an album that fit the oversized effort that went into its construction.

“This was the first record I ever finished and listened to right after and thought, ‘this is good,’”

said Gabriel Birnbaum, the band’s founder and lone constant member. “Almost all the music I like is in that record.”

Of course, that was back in July ’10, when, according to Birnbaum, the real struggle began. He shopped the album to every label he could contact, but no one was biting. Though he stopped short of calling it a waste, surmising it as something that “needed to be done,” the ultimately failed search for label support was, as one might imagine, “shitty and emasculating.”

By January of this year, Birnbaum had decided that he would release God Bless The Hunger himself, which triggered a new set of challenges: hiring a publicist, securing artwork, organizing a release-event and cobbling together a lineup that could at least approach what a rotating cast of musicians had crafted in The Soul Shop, an all-analog studio in Medford where the album was recorded.

The album will finally drop this week with premier shows scheduled for both New York (June 21) and Boston (June 23).

It’s not likely to dominate the ringtone market, but God Bless The Hunger is the kind of disc that a certain breed of music lover searches high and low for. Boy Without God soldiers together an unlikely array of styles with such competence that it might seem glib were it not so warm and fiercely personal. Throughout the ten songs contained, exposed roots in a rich soil of golden-era soul and pop are irregularly twisted, flayed and, at times, devoured by an untamed phylum of semi-freeform jazz. It’s an experimental album that plays like a pop album.

The lyrical themes are old standards (love, sex, death and more love), but they’re delivered with a sense of humor and detail that are uniquely Birnbaum’s. And whether it’s the bellowing saxophones, the bittersweet backing vocals or the modest guitars, every voice on the album has.

“I feel like it works pretty well given how much is in there,” Birnbaum says.

“On other albums I’ve made, there would be nine tracks and five songs with instrumental interludes connecting them that would just be me showing off.

There’s still some [instrumental showmanship], but way more blended into the songs in a way that makes emotional sense with what the songs are about.”

It seems all too fitting that the album is titled God Bless The Hunger. From the earliest visions that came when Birnbaum was studying English and going gaga for a girl in Copenhagen, to the initial recording sessions with a patchwork band who learned the songs on the fly, to Birnabum’s move to Brooklyn in Feb ’10 and the long line of Chinatown bus trips home to record that followed, to the ever-shuffling roster of talented but at certain times unprepared, unavailable, flustered, flatulent, too-drunk or too-sober hired guns that helped along the way… if there’s one thing that this project could not have survived a dearth of, it’s hunger.

Now, Birnbaum is just hoping that some music fans will be able to find what all of the business people missed.

“It’s a record out of time. It requires a lot of attention,” Birnbaum grants. “[But] I feel if anyone gives it the time to listen to it they will find something to like.”