Sturgill Simpson is a top-notch miserablist, from the lyrics that pick at scabs to his defeated vocal tone, leaky even when he’s singing at full power. His second album, “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music” (High Top Mountain), is a triumph of exhaustion, one of the most jolting country albums in recent memory, and one that achieves majesty with just the barest of parts.

“Time and time again, Lord, I’ve been going through the motions/It’s a means to an end but the ends don’t seem to meet,” Mr. Simpson sings resignedly at the top of “Living the Dream.” Even his quick yelp while singing “going” feels doomed, like a pounce on the gas pedal that still doesn’t start the car.

Eventually, he concludes, he’s got nothing to do except “sit around and wait to die.”

This desperation is both felt and a form of drag, rooted in Mr. Simpson’s deep affinity for and understanding of the tattered parts of country music’s past, be it Johnny Cash’s morbid ramblings or Waylon Jennings’s scratched-up heart.

But while plenty of practitioners of classic country see their work as duty, reflecting a need to protect a style that’s beset at every turn by modernization, Mr. Simpson doesn’t have the feel of a preservationist. He speaks the language because he was raised around it, but his dialect is wholly his own.