Bad For You, the fifth album from Nashville's hard-edged bluegrass band The Steeldrivers, arrives after a period of triumph and adaptation. The band's 2015 release, The Muscle Shoals Recordings, won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album. In bluegrass and acoustic music circles, respect for this Nashville quintet is so strong that the win seemed somehow inevitable, like a box being checked off. For the band though, as well as its passionate audience of Steelheads, it was a much bigger deal. The Grammy validated the vision and collective striving of a string band with a rock and soul heart. Industry recognition and better bookings followed.

Then just when the follow-up album was coming together, vocalist and guitar player Gary Nichols decided he needed to go his own way. It was a setback, to be sure. Negotiating the transition from the magisterial soul country voice of band co-founder Chris Stapleton to Nichols had taken work and perseverance, but it had led to the most cohesive, impactful Steeldrivers to date. With a second singer on his way out in eight years, there were questions about how to go forward, if they could at all. But this was a unique, highly resilient band, rooted in the kind of mutual respect that only many years of personal history can forge. The answer came in the form of a 25-year-old rock and roll singer from Berea, KY named Kelvin Damrell.

"I was pretty fresh to bluegrass," Kelvin says. "The only bluegrass I'd heard was couch pickin' at my grandparents' house, and I wasn't into it, to be completely honest. I was a rocker. Cinderella was my favorite band before I met these guys." But that kind of angular perspective was more in tune with The Steeldrivers than he could have known, and his initiation into bluegrass infused a convert's zeal into his performances. "Everybody in the band were virtuosos," he says. "And I'd never seen that side of bluegrass. I thought it was just that old foot stomping traditional stuff, so I was surprised to hear this. And I knew I had a lot of work to do to keep up."

Album-opening title track churns slowly like a paddle-wheel steamer negotiating a shallow muddy river. Kelvin's voice rises and howls with a poignant desperation. Tammy Rogers' fiddle carves lonesome answering lines, and the 15-year Steeldriver tradition of dark, jagged-edged goth-grass feels intact and heading for new places. Then in "The Bartender (Load The Gun)" the main character wrestles with his role. Is he a friend-in-need or an accessory to a crime? It's a question perfectly suited to the Steeldrivers' unsparing blues. Up next, "12 O'Clock Blues" takes us inside the haunted anxiety of insomnia. Written by Rogers with longtime musical companion Kieran Kane and his duo partner Rayna Gellert, it became Kelvin's favorite for its groove shockwaves and its depiction of a shared human experience.

There are brighter offerings as well, including the pure ardor of "I Choose You" and the Cajun-inflected country bounce of "Glad I'm Gone," in which the girl doesn't come back and the singer is damn glad about it. Yet the emotional seriousness of the whole collection is firmly established by "Falling Man," a song inspired by the breathtaking photo of an unidentified victim of 9/11 "caught in a frame" and thus made immortal. "I'll never die/I'll never land/Call me what I am/A falling man," sings Kelvin in his most vulnerable performance, with Rogers in sympathetic harmony. It leaves you with chills.