BECK’S BACK: Boston took eight years between...

BECK’S BACK: Boston took eight years between its last album and its new one. Beck didn’t even take eight months. The L.A. hip-hop-folkster best known for his song “Loser” has just released “One Foot in the Grave,” the follow-up to his Geffen debut album, “Mellow Gold,” which came out in February.

This one’s not on Geffen, though. It’s on the tiny, Olympia, Wash.-based K Records. (Geffen didn’t drop Beck; his contract with the company allows him to release independent music through small labels.)

No one seems to expect the new album, with its oddball folk-blues ditties and ranting punk songs, to approach the 600,000 sales figure reached so far by “Mellow Gold.” But it’s certain to eclipse K’s previous top seller, a 1993 album by the group Tiger Trap that has sold about 10,000 copies.

Can K handle the bigger scale?

“We seem to be doing all right,” says the label’s laconic owner Calvin Johnson (whose own band, the Halo Benders, also has a new record out on K). “For us, it’s not really any different than the other records we put out in terms of why we put it out or who he is. He’s a guy who makes up songs and has a way he wants them to be, so that’s how we treat it.”