BILL CALLAHAN’S “Apocalypse” is a record that knows itself. Mr. Callahan, 44, one of our best lyricists and now — finally — a singer approaching excellence, uses his voice carefully, in a no-vibrato baritone, going down to Merle Haggard’s range. His recent songs have the pace of a more confiding time in music, when singer-songwriters in Nashville and Los Angeles were first working out what male sensitivity sounds like. “Apocalypse” can resemble an early-1970s record by Gordon Lightfoot or Mickey Newbury, but more heavy-hearted, slowed down by a quarter, with far fewer chords, and with words that embody rather than explain.

Its lyrics form a bestiary: cattle, hog, bee and buffalo are all here, as well as the phrase “work’s calving increments and love’s coltish punch.” It works the phrase “my apocalypse” into the fourth and seventh songs, which are the first and last tracks of the album’s second side in its vinyl version. Its last lyric, sung twice and meaningfully, is “DC 450”: the catalog number of the album, released last week on the label Drag City.

The record’s fulcrum, lyrically and conceptually, comes around the middle, halfway through the fourth track. In the song, “Universal Applicant,” over a slithering, one-chord piece of music, the narrator fires a flare gun, an action that Mr. Callahan first describes and then imitates, in two small and precise aspirant sounds. I noticed it — went back to hear it a few times more in fact — but didn’t know how important it was to the whole work.

“That part of the song is the turning point of the record,” he told me recently. In e-mail, he is sharp and funny and occasionally strident, but in person he’s nearly the opposite: hesitating to name or quantify very much, rounding off incomplete thoughts with quick, conciliatory grins. At my request we went to a place where we could talk freely in almost complete quiet, a Midtown office-building cafeteria at night. Still, he radiated reluctance, and my recorder had trouble registering his voice.