Conor Oberst has been through some shit lately. Since the ostensible dissolution of Bright Eyes after the band’s ninth album The People’s Key in 2011, the virtuoso singer/songwriter has grieved the 2016 death of his brother (a schoolteacher named Matthew) and divorced from Camila Figueroa Escamilla the following year. Add to that the election of Donald Trump and the insidious nationalistic turn in today’s American politics — surely discouraging events for a sensitive progressive like Oberst —  and the small fact of a global pandemic. That makes a monumentally turbulent decade in anyone’s book. But the multi-hyphenate Oberst returns to his best-known project now in a perfect storm of sorrow and productivity, lending an energised, alert quality to Bright Eyes’ latest release, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was.

Bright Eyes, rounded out by instrumentalists Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, was starting to flag by the release of People’s Key — never low in quality, but increasingly drained of inspiration since the early-2000s highs of albums like Fevers and Mirrors or I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. By 2011, it seemed the project had little left to offer. All three members turned their attention elsewhere. Oberst flew furthest, releasing a string of solo releases, fronting punk outfit Desaparecidos and collaborating with vogue sad-folk troubadour Phoebe Bridgers on last year’s exemplary Better Oblivion Community Center. Meanwhile, Mogis turned to engineering and production, and composed the score for 2014’s teen romance The Fault in Our Stars alongside Walcott, who kept busy as a session musician. As such, the erstwhile trio’s reunion represents a return to Bright Eyes’ foundational motivations. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but assuredly justifies its continued existence.

Initially scuzzy and fuzzy in the 90s, the Bright Eyes sound was established on those major releases in the new millennium. A sort of emo-baroque hybrid, it’s an aesthetic with equal hands in analogue, folksy instrumentation and more fractious, amorphous digital production techniques. It’s manifest immediately in “Pageturner’s Rag,” the collage-like introductory track to Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was. A fragmented spoken word passage recited in Spanish (reportedly the voice of Figueroa Escamilla) spills into a vaudevillian preamble of saloon piano and horn which becomes overwhelmed by harsh, dissonant noise and overlapping sampled voices. The naturalistic is embedded within the artificial, at turns smoothing one another out and roughening one another up, and this commitment to the signature Bright Eyes sonic template, lightly augmented and modernised for 2020, remains consistent across the record.

Oberst is reckoning with the confusion and devastation of the recent past from the moment he opens his mouth on “Dance and Sing,” the album’s first song in earnest. “Got to keep on going like it ain’t the end,” he urges himself and the listener, and later promises “I’ll grieve what I have lost.” The tune kicks off in a sturdy blues-rock mode, gradually unfolding into broader, Beatlesque textures of slide guitars, horn sections and sweeping strings. It’s Bright Eyes as we know it, but the canvas is ever so slightly bigger — a touch more epic. This traditional-but-bigger approach resonates across the track list, as in the massive drum sounds backing up a folksy strum on “Just Once in the World” or the reverberating beats, dramatic strings and slap bass that nuance the edges of solemn piano ballad “One and Done.”

Many tracks on the album freshen up the band’s signature sound by folding in elements from Oberst’s intervening projects. A number of tunes open with earthy acoustic guitars or considered pianos and the singer’s strained, emotive vocal front-and-centre in a Bob Dylan-indebted mode not dissimilar to Ruminations, his stark and spare solo effort from 2016. On the phase-based “To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts),” the band builds over a tranquil, ghostly landscape that harkens to Oberst’s Better Oblivion Community Center collaborator Bridgers — and the singer herself seems to float over Oberst’s stream-of-consciousness words on a faint backing track before the song pivots into a gleeful, Queen-like guitar solo.

An unmistakeable 80s aesthetic rears its head on a handful of cuts, as with standout track and lead single “Mariana Trench.” The song is drenched in airy New Wave synths and buoyed up by a springy bass line. Its lyrical content is classic Oberst storytelling, painting pictures of a cowboy fresh out of rehab or a lamenting stockbroker. The chorus is wordy and prone to mutate on each go round, but its melody is unabashedly pop and imminently catchy. It’s an intriguing and imminently successful diversion into a huge but still suitably soft sound, one that later feeds into the brief curio “Pan & Broom,” whose languorous 808 beats and squeaking Moog lines recall English synth-pop pioneers Yazoo.

Other tunes skew closer to what one might expect, but remain enjoyable in spite of this lack of freshness. Oberst uses this less challenging context to lyrically face down his demons more directly, as on the yearning Americana of “Tilt-a-Whirl” which opens starkly on the line “My phantom brother came to me” before proceeding to ruminate on aging, loss and loneliness, or the sparse piano of “Hot Car in the Sun” where he directly admits to “dreaming of my ex-wife’s face.” Fun superficial touches like a bagpipe interlude on “Persona Non Grata” or the buoyant four-on-the-floor drums of “Forced Convalescence” are the subtler notes of experimentation on the album’s more straightforward second half.

Reunited with his most enduring musical partners, Oberst frees himself up on the climactic, cinematic opulence of “Calais to Dover” and closer “Comet Song” to imbue his painful reflections with hopeful, magical-realist imagery. Seemingly speaking to his bandmates, he admits “this wild wanderlust just got out of control.” But after a rough decade out in the wild, Oberst is home and doing what he knows best. That’s ultimately the vibe that previous albums like Fevers and Mirrors or I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning provide — they are reassuring, contemplative and open. Conor Oberst has been through some shit lately, but he’ll get by with a little help from his friends.

Rhys Handley (@RhysHandley2113) is a journalist and film writer from Yorkshire in England. Now based in London, he is the biggest Talking Heads fan who still hasn’t seen Stop Making Sense.