This is a miserable time to live through. Everybody knows it, including, I suspect, the rotten people who are actively engaged in causing all the misery. I take solace where I can, and one of the clearest rays of gratifying light to bask in is that I can enjoy the peak years of the Boygenius Melodic Universe.

Two years after Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus assembled for The Record, their debut full-length as boygenius, the skilled singer-songwriters are starting to release their follow-up projects. For Baker, it seems collaboration was especially satisfying. Rather than adding to her already fine collection of solo albums, she jumped into a new partnership with Mackenzie Scott, who performs as TORRES. The team-up was reportedly initiated when Torres reached out to Baker with a simple proposition: Would she like to make a country album together?

The resulting work, titled Send a Prayer My Way, indeed meets that brief. There are certainly times when it tilts away from the genre that the duo claims; only the barest hint of twang and the brief incursion of a pedal steel guitar separate “Downhill Both Ways” from one of airy, aching ballads that appeared on Baker’s album Little Oblivions. For more often, though, the material reaches back to eras before pop encroached on country, when there was a place on AM playlists for an earthy performer with a guitar and a penchant for evoking heartbreak and boozy melancholy is both their music and words.

The album opens with the spare, lovely “Dirt,” sounding modern and timeless at the same time, like a current country act’s earnest attempt at a back-to-basics sound. Baker and TORRES know there’s only a slender thread separating tropes from the tried and true, and they’re clearly comfortable walking that line. There are songs about the troubles brought on by alcohol, such as “Bottom of the Bottle” and “Off the Wagon” (“It makes sense to want to feel good/ It makes sense to want not to feel/ They say living is something that you choose/ But it makes sense with no chips left to lose”), and pitiable romantic misery is spotted across the album. This is the stuff of proper tear-in-my-beer nights out.

Baker and TORRES are too skilled as songwriters to settle for pastiche. One of the deepest pleasures of Send a Prayer My Way is the adherence to well-worn forms that play out with sharp, sly expansions of them. “Tape Runs Out” has the low, rumbling focus of vintage Buffalo Tom as the lyrics reckon with morning-after detective work after a night of overindulging: “Baby, can you fill me in on last night?/ Somewhere after nine, the tape runs out/ You say I made you cry, but that it’s no big deal/ Laughing as you kiss me on the mouth.” “Tuesday” is plucky enough to call to mind Kimya Dawson as TORRES recounts a same-sex attraction that was thwarted by the title character’s cowardice in the face of family disapproval (“Instead of backing me up, Tuesday melted right down/ Asked me to write her mother and say, sorry for the confusion/ That of course there had been no sin/ To emphasize how much I love Jesus and men”).

There are winners strewn across like album, like Baker and TORRES are dealing from a deck stacked with aces. There’s tempered jubilation in “Sugar in the Tank,” which tunefully lists the evocative sensations of the deeply smitten (“I love you clear as day and in the dark/ I love you sleeping on my dead left arm/ I love you all the time that I can get/ I love you now already, and not yet”) and the loose, nimble, and playful sendoff “Goodbye Baby” to close the album. It’s a marker of the aplomb and expertise they bring to the album that they can reasonable be comparable to some masterly predecessors. It’s a high compliment to note that “Showdown” has the easygoing perfection of Lyle Lovett in his Joshua Judges Ruth prime.

Maybe Send a Prayer My Way will wind up a splendid one-off pairing, like Waxhatchee and Jess Williamson bonding as Plains. Or maybe it’s a new tributary of this indie-rock river system that’s bringing welcome nourishment to the fallow ground of the current culture. Either way, it’s a blessing to let this record spin.