For Will Sheff, there’s nothing more heroic than failure. The leader of Okkervil River, Sheff sifts through the emotional wreckage of collapses and tragedies like a prospector panning for gold—there’s beauty in that mess somewhere. Okkervil’s fifth disc is a companion to last year’s excellent The Stage Names, and its subjects, as the title implies, are people on fame’s fringes: suicidal porn stars, frustrated poets, self-loathing groupies. Lyrically, Sheff straddles the line between precious and brilliant, warbling twisty, appositive-packed tales about life on the road (“Lost Coastlines”) and crumbled relationships (“Calling and Not Calling My Ex”) over cranked-up, vaguely folkish rock riffs. And, in typically self-deprecating fashion, his least sympathetic characters—the manipulative rock star in “Pop Lie,” the entitled artiste he lops off at the knees in the cheerfully acidic “Singer Songwriter”—might be Sheff himself.

DOWNLOAD “Lost Coastlines,” “Singer Songwriter,” “Calling and Not Calling My Ex”