The album begins with a funeral, and not the kind most of us hope we’ll have. Only one person shows up: Death Cab for Cutie singer Ben Gibbard. Reaching the grave requires a hike down slippery terrain, then into a creek. He tries to strike up a conversation with the departed, who may have been a suicide. Gibbard gets no reply, unsurprisingly, so he talks and talks, and as he grows louder and more unhinged, so does the music. Defeated, he climbs back to his car, “no closer to any kind of truth, as I must assume was the case with you.” No one describes the weight of loneliness and loss as meticulously as Gibbard. We see some loon muttering to himself in a stream; he sees a short story.

With 2000’s We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, Death Cab keyed in to a gentle version of indie rock—vulnerable, pretty, hushed—that invited listeners to lean toward their speakers as though toward a confidant. Gibbard is a bard of failing romances. He can write a great head-over-heels ballad, but undertows of unease and regret reliably drag him downward. Transatlanticism, in 2003, was about relationships beset by distance; Plans, which marked Death Cab’s jump to a major label two years later (and their rechristening as “the band that O.C. nerd loves”), described relationships beset by death. His songs have always had an autobiographical, sometimes self-indulgent smack, but here he turns his gaze toward others, imagining the inner thoughts of solitary, desperate people. This LP, which matches Transatlanticism as Death Cab’s best, explores relationships between couples isolated from each other—where one person is more in love than the other, where one fantasizes constantly about cheating, where the relationship itself is a figment of someone’s tortured imagination. Narrow stairs are the kind you can’t climb side by side with someone else.

Gibbard is a fussy singer. His phrasing, sighing and precise, is an elocution teacher’s dream, and he adores elaborate metaphors and bookish syntax. On past albums, ­guitarist-producer Chris Walla built musical beds out of spry riffs, solemn piano and muted beats—backgrounds at once spare and rich with ambient hum; Gibbard’s words draped across the arrangements like garland over skeletons.

But these guys have been drinking their Muscle Milk. This time out, lullabies and marches give way to brawn, speed and squall. Not that Gibbard’s gotten any less bleak. The lead single is “I Will Possess Your Heart,” an eight-and-a-half-minute stalker jam set to a repetitive, insistent bass line. The subject ­matter is eerie, but Gibbard’s verse is elegantly assembled, as he imagines a guy who can’t see his crush for his own manias: “There are days when, outside your window, I see my reflection as I slowly pass/And I long for this mirrored perspective, when we’ll be lovers, lovers at last.” The song sounds like nothing Death Cab have ever done, and not just because of its droning ­Krautrock groove—it’s a pleasant sur­prise to hear Gibbard inhabit such a self-­consciously creepy role, rather than play the occasionally errant, essentially good-hearted boyfriend who soft-shoes through so many of his tales. By imagining losers and depressives stuck in their own heads, he’s broken out of his own.

For all his forlorn preoccupations, Gibbard isn’t a total downer. “Your New Twin-Sized Bed” is a sad story with a refracted glimmer of optimism. A girl junks her ­spacious queen mattress, convinced she’ll never find someone to share it with. “Now it’s in the alley behind your apartment,” he sings, “with a sign that says, It’s free/And I hope you have more luck with this than me.” The girl is a stand-in for Gibbard, and the note’s just like one of his songs: an index of personal misery he hopes will comfort whoever stumbles upon it.

Download “Cath... ,” “I Will Possess Your Heart,” “Long Division”