Plenty of people have made Covid-era albums so far, but most of them avoid the elephant in the proverbial room and try to sound as normal as possible. Not the case of local country artist Shawn Williams’ latest: She recorded it all while locked away, with only her own guitar and the occasional keyboard overdub for accompaniment, plus the kind of intimate vocals you’d deliver when there’s no one around. While none of the songs are about the pandemic, all of them attest to the kind of brutal self-examination that many of us are prone to under shutdown.

It’s a brave album in a few ways: Most of these songs are too intense to slot easily into the kind of club gigs she was doing beforehand. And there isn’t a song here that doesn’t dive into risky emotional territory, whether it’s the depression she admits to in the title track, or the frank confessions in “Lost My Mind” (which is about the after-effects of an impulsive hookup at Check Point Charlie, and opens with a perfectly wasted-sounding “Oh my God”). Also here is one of the more painful breakup songs in recent memory, “Afterall,” in which the singer gears herself for never being loved again. The most haunting tune of the lot, “I Can Dream,” pleads that everything would be all right if the beloved would return, while allowing that it’s unlikely to happen.

This is, in other words, not a happy album—but it is a beautifully cathartic one, with some lovingly crafted songs and even some flashes of dark humor (“I’ve been doing lines, but not writing them”—that’s an opening line). Comparisons to latter-day Lucinda Williams would be easy, but this is really more like her version of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, minus the latter’s light-relief songs. If the experiences here weren’t fun, they did move Williams to deliver on the creative promise she’s had for some time.