Austin-based singer-songwriter Sean Keel is one of a kind, both in lived-in, cracked vocals and intriguing, poetic lyrics. Dinosaur, his fourth solo album, pulls together the title tracks from the five EPs that were released in recent months—Fischer, Barn Dance, The Breeze That Brought Them, Everyone Shrugged, and Parade—and folds into six new songs that stay close to the characteristic bone: stark acoustic folk frames, and just enough cinematic shimmer to let the stories breathe.

The lyrics circle Keel’s usual territory: the big, ordinary devastations of life, between tenderness and ruin—how everything we hold eventually lets go, and how we keep holding anyway. Again and again, he shows how the smallest details (a moth in a web, a missed button, a neon sign, a horse’s eye) hold the full weight of time passing. Even the comic or chaotic moments—he jokes that one of the new tracks, And A Cupcake, is actually meant to be funny, a revelation he admits listeners don’t always grant him—carry the ache of people trying to love each other inside broken systems and failing bodies.

The synergy between weathered voice and emotional words hits me every time—this may be a record that asks you to lean in, but it rewards you for doing so.

Dinosaur, produced by Gabriel Rhodes, is out now digitally through Icons Creating Evil Art.

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