If Barton Hollow, the unlikely, Grammy Award-winning, indie Americana debut by The Civil Wars, was a portentously sensual imagining of two characters locked in the type of bleak attraction that you knew wouldn’t end well, then their self-titled follow-up is the culmination of this beautiful death spiral. The energy is intensified, the pain more visceral and the whole thing much more first-person than the now quaint-sounding debut. It’s as if Joy Williams and John Paul White painted a black-and-white rendering of a romantic but haunted cabin in the woods, threw the whole thing in a roaring fire – and then painted a picture of the painting as it burned.

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