This is the sound of heartbreak, despair, and rage.

Seattle alt-folkie Damien Jurado’s decade of music making has produced some of the saddest, most tear-jerking music you could possibly imagine. Despite starting off in a little-heard hardcore punk band with Pedro The Lion’s David Bazan, Jurado has tended to channel the darker side of American folk music—from “Folsom Prison Blues” to “Nebraska” to “I See a Darkness” and all steps in between.

His songs tend to be populated both by misfits and miscreants—killers, cheaters, gamblers, cuckolds—and even the cities and states they live in take on the fully-drawn nature of characters. Jurado may write about invented people, but his first-person narratives never feel like fiction. Artifice and self-conscious myth-making are absent from these songs. Instead we have something closer to autobiography.

On a song like “Amateur Night” off 2003’s masterful Where Shall You Take Me, Jurado treads similar territory to Sufjan Stevens’ empathetic ode to serial killer John Wayne Gacy—with the same creeping sense that perhaps the line between personal weakness and monstrosity is thinner than we think. In his plea that he just has “a habit [he] can’t kick,” the murderous narrator sounds eerily like anyone else in their self-justifying moods.

Unfortunately, as with many acoustic singer-songwriters, Jurado can be easily dismissed as derivative of the sounds of an earlier age. While it’s true that much of his recent output has sounded like a deliberate attempt at replicating Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, little is lost in the translation to the modern day and the songs have a resonance that becomes apparent on repeated listens.

Case in point: “Tether,” also off Where Shall You Take Me—possibly Jurado’s most willfully out-of-time record. The simple strum of the guitar and the deliberately archaic language are folk in the purest sense. Nevertheless, the emotional depth is such that the listener is left in no doubt as the genuine feeling that underlies the mimicry.

While he’s capable of writing catchy, upbeat songs, Jurado has mostly eschewed them for the harrowing and the morose. It’s definitely his forte. His new album, And Now That I’m In Your Shadow, is loaded with sad ballads, none more so than the title track. The song is remarkable for the tragic resignation that Jurado’s rich, rough-edged voice imbues it with.

The new album is technically the product of a band—with new members Eric Fisher and Jenna Conrad—but it retains all the hallmarks of Jurado’s solo work. There’s precious little rock-band wankery to be found and the stark minimalism of previous albums remains.

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