The follow-up to the Belfast-based alt-folk singer’s debut seems well-titled from the opening effects of I Saw The Night, an industrial clank and clatter, aural strobe, muffled chatter that make Peaky Blinders sound tranquil before he starts singing like some calcified Robin Williamson backed by a droning organ. It could indeed be emanating from the pits of some Bosch-like inferno, Joshua Burnside describing the album as “an absurdist examination at the suffering humans inflict on each other every day and the innate human condition that demands we find some humour in it lest we collapse.”  Park any expectations of cheery folk singalongs at the door.

The opening lines containing the album’s title, Under The Concrete, continues in a brooding frame of mind (“Nothing is bolder than the jump/From the window sill/Into the depths of hell/ Into the clutches of The Devil himself/But never mind, that talk is a little premature/I have many sins worse to commit first”), but by contrast is positively light and frothy with handclaps, acoustic fingerpicking and traditional roots peeking between the more lurching rhythms, again evocative of those early Incredible String Band days (or being Irish, perhaps Dr. Strangely Strange), brass making its way into the mix in the final stretch.

Opening with a repeated jittery piano note, tolling bells, radio static and sampled speech, which includes Richard Burton talking about his battle with alcoholism, the deeply pessimistic And You Evade Him/Born In The Blood, slowly unfolds from the first lines of “I was a liar/When I said/I am not afraid/I am” into a  dark, bubbling rhythmic undertow punctuated by sonic stabs of guitars, drums and effects, causing you to feel as if you’re drowning in some fever dream as he sings of the inevitable slow dance “into the teeth of time” and a world where “Now to the almighty bank/ Bow I”. It emerges into a cleaner, lighter musical dawn with the fingerpicking of the Whiskey Whiskey, though the playfully fatalistic ‘fear of flying’ lyrics certainly don’t follow suit as, “an Ulster man/A goddamn liberal” he’s on a  plane caught in turbulence, thoughts of doom cloud his mind as, faith in God having long vanished and having “had my fair share of/Conversations with/Twisted metal and/Broken glass”, he asks the cabin crew for “no ice in my whiskey” declaring “I ain’t gonna die sober”.

Spreading out of over six minutes, the mortality-confronting Driving Alone In The City At Night again begins with sound effects, sounding like an orchestra tuning up as thunder rumbles and rain washes in the distance, creating an urban soundscape before the slurred vocals finally emerge over the pulsing single note, a solitary traveller cruising the streets, the arrangement ebbing and flowing with drum speed bumps along the way as he sings of an old man “found in the morning, under the white land/A half-pint of Guinness frozen to his hand” and an apocalyptic vision of how “eventually all of our buried skeletons/Are gently uncovered by smiling Americans/And all is explained,/How we came to such unfortunate endings/By the cracks on our skulls/And the dull arrows in our graves”. I suspect Burnside is no stranger to James Joyce.

Banjo stumbles drunkenly into the slouched violin-shaded shuffle Noa Mercier, one of the more straightforward numbers musically speaking, (the lyrics, with mentions of Killowen in Co. Down and the line “when you fell from the podium into flaming petroleum you said you saw, me swimming in a black ocean” rather less so) before, referencing Vienna and Freud (“there’s only sex and murder /In the back of our skulls”), the spare, hollow strum and clarinet of Will You Go Or Must I nods to protest territory (“Oh the notes that swell and spin/They won’t fill empty bellies” with what sounds like cheeky saloon piano nod to the Scottish traditional Loch Lomond as he concludes “we will fight and we will win”.

Then, exploding with a fusillade of drums comes the strident folk-rock of  War On Everything which, turning to themes of relationships decaying or in stasis, captures its scenario in the opening line of “She said I feel lonely when I’m with you…Because when you’re with me/You’re not with me/You’re with everybody else”, the narrator reflecting on when they first met (“You were passed out on the balcony/Undisturbed by the cacophony/Of Paris in the morning”, of standing at the ocean’s edge “Screaming mister tambourine man”,  now only old ghosts as they have become  “Like a vampire’s reflection” in the other’s eyes.

The brief strings drone and minimal acoustic strum of Napolean’s Nose with its near indecipherable distant words serve as a prelude to the final track. Plucked banjo, crunchy unsteady feet on gravel sound effects and coughing set the scene for the cod-traditional empty-handed lament Nothing For Ye, the sound of someone drunkenly singing as, an Appalachian air surfacing midway, they sway their way back from the pub to hopefully their woman waiting back home, the final verse revealing him to be some penniless singer warned by his late mother that pursuing such a  career will only end up with him down the dole office. If he keeps making such challenging but electrifying albums like this, there should be no need for him signing on any time in the foreseeable future.

Into the Depths of Hell is a potent and thought-provoking album, one to cherish.