The Richmond scene never quite received the critical canonisation it deserved from these shores, and Hi Ho Six Shooter were always its most peculiarly compelling export — a group whose debut arrived sewn inside a burlap pouch, as if the very act of listening required a degree of agrarian commitment. That debut, Passing Through Just Like a Ghost, announced a band who understood instinctively that Americana was less a genre than a posture, and that the most interesting thing you could do with a posture was subvert it from the inside. The twangy punk energy they deployed then — all wiry guitars and Civil War ghost stories — has been replaced here by something slower and more deliberate, the way a river slows as it widens.

Close as Kin does not arrive with the structural ambition of Empire, their concept album and most overt bid for critical legitimacy. It is instead a single of the old school: self-contained, purposeful, and possessed of a chorus that lodges in the breastbone rather than the brain. The songwriting signals a band that has, over the intervening decades of school runs and mortgage payments and all the other mundane machinery of adult life, refined its instinct for the quietly devastating lyric. Human connection — precarious, necessary, occasionally absurd — is the subject, and the band approach it with neither false comfort nor fashionable despair.

The production rewards careful listening. Guitar work sits just far enough back in the mix to suggest restraint rather than timidity, while the arrangement breathes in the way that only comes from players who have stopped trying to fill every available space. Vocally, the delivery carries the particular authority of someone who has actually lived through the things they're singing about — not performed grief or performed joy, but the murkier, more interesting territory between. It calls to mind Ryan Adams at his most unguarded, or perhaps a less self-destructive Whiskeytown — the kind of Americana that knows enough not to call itself Americana.

The bolo ties remain. The ten-gallon hats are presumably still in rotation. But alongside the costuming, something has arrived that the younger iteration of this band was still reaching for: genuine weight. The years away have not blunted Hi Ho Six Shooter; they have compressed them, the way pressure compresses carbon. Close as Kin is not a comeback single in the desperate, career-resuscitation sense. It is simply a very good song from a band that has finally caught up to the stories they always wanted to tell.

One suspects the real question is not whether Hi Ho Six Shooter still have it. Close as Kin answers that with considerable ease. The question, more pressingly, is when the rest of the record is coming — because on this evidence, the wait will be worth it.