In his 20s, when Nate Amos was uploading his every musical impulse to Bandcamp, he released a particularly out-there tranche of songs focused on “technology corrupting nature,” he told the Guardian recently. He soon came to understand this noisy spell as a symptom of anxiety and depression: “The beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a hard time with the known.” The newer work that’s made his name as This Is Lorelei is tellingly lucid by contrast, the work of someone who can now look discomfort dead on and make it beautiful.

It doesn’t take a leap to connect that to Amos’ recent sobriety. His official debut album, 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star—a crystalline pop record that stealthily acquired masterpiece status, affirmed by an all-star reimagining—came after he addressed his alcohol and substance use. Where some people claim to undergo a total personality overhaul alongside such a shift, Amos considered that idea and found it dishonest. You can hear it in Box’s many irrepressible styles, and in how he let his timeless pop songs loosen into more diffuse arrangements to reject the idea of too-tidy resolution: a sign that he wasn’t just an economical writer with an eye for tightly nested imagery (“And I know it’s only cards/But love I feel your heart in spades”) but an equally intentional composer.

The Singer in My Band pushes further into almost prelapsarian simplicity: skippy, scuffed country-leaning songs perky with twang and walking basslines. Amos whittles endlessly charming melodies like one of those roadside carpenters equally capable of carving a duck as a motorbike. Hat-tipping to his bluegrass whiz dad (who adds an electrifying banjo to the title track), the tighter sound means Singer doesn’t have the magpie dazzle of Box. But even within those limitations, Amos continues to prove he’s one of those people who’s just good at everything: would-be standards, picaresque capers; cowpunk farce, burning frustration, purest heartbreak. “You were right to go, don’t you think so?/When I wouldn’t trade a good night for a better day,” he sings on “And I Haven’t Seen My Love in Quite a While,” a self-lacerating take on the record’s theme of whether you can outrun your true nature. The close focus of the sound underscores the feeling that Amos is puzzling all this out in earnest.

Amos has declared Singer a “road record,” saying he daydreamed these songs into existence from the back of the van and that its slippery protagonists are inspired by characters he met on tour. He has a close eye for character motivation; in his hands, songs that may once have been diaristic feel apocryphal. This sweet-natured chronicler of outlaws uses Joey, Billy, Buddy, Sarah, a pistol-slinging crystal dealer, and more as windows into what it means to skip out on life—or to finally show up. On opener “I Will Eat My Heart in the Morning Light,” Amos isn’t living in the past, or the future, or letting God take the wheel—he’s staying present and taking time as it comes. True to his word, the brushed arrangement strolls along breezily; the moments where his voice dovetails exactly with the bass tickle like those moments of natural synchronicity that come as the reward for living this way.

But Singer would be boring if it was all heartfelt intention-setting. Its bristling energy comes from the way Amos beholds his wayward characters with awe and frustration, beguiled by their cavalier freedom. If “Oh No Now My” teases his frustration at Joey trying to escape his past with the most constrained guitar solo you’ve ever heard, like a snake writhing in a trap, then “The Kid With the Crown” finally boils over with impatience and squall in pursuit of a liar whose truths are biting at his heels almost as fast as Amos’ ceaseless internal rhymes tumble into one another. “You can say that it’s funny Buddy, I’m not laughing at all,” he sings with equanimity, but his verbal momentum is, undeniably, pretty funny.

Amos has said his religious upbringing prevented him from developing much of a sense of spirituality. But God and Satan have long been lyrical playthings in his work, and Singer feels a little like a newly conscientious songwriter sketching his own gospel. The gutting “Hey Sarah Is It Gonna Rain Forever” conjures the hell of fearing yourself; the carefree and gorgeously silly “Watching Heaven Fall” and its tales of youthful sin makes a case for the postlapsarian idyll and going down together. On paper, the twirling power-pop of standout “Billy Came Back” seems to be about a wreckhead with a preternatural talent for karaoke who skips town only to reappear years later, inexplicably wearing cowboy boots. But the wonder Amos brings to his portrait, and the heartfelt chorus to Billy’s soulfulness—“Like he’s singing from the bottom of a deep blue sea/Yeah my Billy’s got a voice that sings for you and me”—makes him seem kind of like an angel looming large in the lives of everyone he touches.

What does it mean to be the person who sings for others? On the frisky title track, Amos fails to persuade the woman with a suitcase full of crystal to front his band. She’s busy trying to get to heaven—Chicago—and tells him, “You’re gonna have to sing yourself.” In that Guardian interview, Amos said he didn’t know why “out of all the people I know, I’m the one who is given this opportunity.” On a record that feels as lived-in as it does completely alive, he meets that opportunity with an open heart and another pledge. “You can stay inside of here/You can laugh at love in here,” he sings on closer “Don’t You Cry in Lonesomeness,” a song that might offer shelter to a lover, or to his listeners. It’s just Amos and a softly burbling electric guitar. Where Box denied redemption, Singer gives it up without reserve.