Last year Willy Vlautin published his seventh novel The Horse recounting the life story of Al; an alcoholic casino musician who has retreated from society; through the chance encounter which forces him to re-engage, and in so doing opens up an opportunity for redemption. What Al does best, and the safe place to which he retreats, is songwriting; in the course of the novel we learn the titles of way more than two hundred of his compositions which act as comment and chorus to the events of the novel.

Anyone familiar with Willy’s music will recognise them as similar, and occasionally identical, to songs of his, and have noted on the book’s endpapers the handwritten lyrics and chords to a song called ‘Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom’. After a decade together, during which they’ve overcome grotesque setbacks, Willy and The Delines give every impression of having achieved their pomp. With a long settled line-up rooted in his earlier band Richmond Fontaine, and a voice in Amy Boone he can trust implicitly to inhabit his songs, they are now delivering work of a stature and surety matched by few of their peers.

Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom marks a departure. Previous Delines’ albums took unity (and their titles) from place. These songs are about people and relationships, people in motion, travelling, arriving, and leaving. Amy had asked Willy for a song with a happy ending and what she got was ‘Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom’. It’s an ideal opener, the song is there immediately, a couple of seconds of guitar and then Amy’s voice; the first four words “Ms. Doom was half-living” tell all you need to know. It’s a refined piece of country soul with all the band’s elements in place; a song complete in itself but equally the précis or storyboard for something longer.

It ends well or as close to well as you’re going to get with lives this precarious; and everyone we’ll meet here exists precariously; they’re already damaged, and even when they have agency it’s conditional. What’s presented across the eleven tracks is a spectrum of scenarios, reflecting and obliquely commenting on each other.

There are further couple songs in ‘Her Ponyboy’, ‘JP And Me’, and ‘Nancy And The Pensacola Pimp’; all road songs with contrasting resolutions. ‘Her Ponyboy’, a tale of inevitable tragedy for a pair of teenage lovers on the run, spare and compelling, mostly just Amy’s voice and a piano, engagement is quick and total, and you’re held until it ends as you always suspected it would. ‘JP And Me’ starts equally spare but turns lush; a story of tentative regret but self-knowledge gained; the pair ‘ran together for a while’; and as with the ponyboy we’ll see this woman ‘hold him all night like I would never let him go’ but the beautiful moments are fleeting and she has to let him go to save herself.

‘Nancy And The Pensacola Pimp’ presents a tale of abuse and hard-edged revenge so riveting that the musical setting is initially almost unnoticed. Unlike ‘Left Hook Like Frazier’ swinging with a poppy movement belying its litany of bad choices such that chorus lines like ‘if you want to hurt yourself even more, men like this will help you to’ speed by. It also has a brief and sweet ‘little by little by little’ reminding that Amy was once dubbed a ‘beat-up Dusty Springfield’.

Another big production replete with chorus and horns is ‘Don’t Miss Your Bus Lorraine’ where we get a rare outing for Willy’s voice along with Sean Oldham and Freddy Trujillo. Lorraine’s marked as a felon for selling the same dope anyone can now buy over the counter and she’s struggling. Much like Maureen, except ‘Maureen’s Gone Missing’, in a song opening with funky roll then easing into a marvellous piece of scene setting gradually revealing the narrator to be less omnipotent and more complicit whereupon we raise a little cheer.

There’s little cheer in either ‘There’s Nothing Down The Highway’ or ‘The Haunting Thoughts’ but each sheds crucial light on what keeps victims victims. At least in the latter the fear starts to be leavened by understanding, such that it’s uncertain where the warning in the brief coda ‘Don’t Go Into That House’ is coming from.

It signs off the record with a glimmer of hope that patterns won’t repeat; patterns that Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom has rehearsed and reiterated but equally indicated doesn’t have to be that way. Living with these songs brings an appreciation of just what an accomplished writer, and – given the spare economy of his words – editor, Vlautin has made himself into. Though equally he must thank the gods every morning he has a voice like Amy Boone’s, and the chops of the rest of The Delines, to realise work of this quality.

Mr. Luck And Ms. Doom is available now from Decor Records. Buy it here.

The Delines are touring the UK. Check out the dates.