The opening is brave. "No One Left to Blame" begins on a railway platform, where a stranger asks for a light and sees in the narrator a man done with caring. From there it becomes a study of numbness, that bottomless wish to feel anything other than yourself. It is a confession delivered at walking pace, without self-pity, and it sets the moral temperature for the record. Nobody here is let off the hook, least of all the singer.

Gordon Burke turns that unforgiving eye outwards, too. "Who Needs Who" is the album's great set piece, a long rumble of fault lines, false flags and bread lines that asks what we become when the whole edifice comes down. It could have curdled into a lecture. Instead it keeps a human pulse, closing on a quiet, unsettling image of the satellites that supposedly keep us safe. "The Damage" nods, knowingly and honourably, to Neil Young, and asks how we recover from greed and the harm it leaves behind.

The darker confessions are the album's backbone. "Send Me an Angel" is a prayer from a man at the end of his tether, stumbling from a pre-dawn plea for strength to a bar on the corner, with blood on his boots and a rodeo he must face alone. It is as unguarded as anything I've heard from an Australian band in years. "Love Again" offers its mirror image, a man scrubbing the righteousness off himself and accepting the blame so that something softer can begin. Between them they give the record its spiritual argument. Contrition is not weakness, and grace has to be worked for.

Then comes the tenderness, which is where the album earns its stripes. "I Knew" is a love song of rare grown-up warmth. It starts with a brown suede summer dress and ends, many Christmases later, with a daughter grown and a marriage that has outlasted the worst of him. Anyone can write about the first spark. Writing about the years afterwards, and making them romantic, is much harder. "Willows in the Wind" closes the album as a lullaby for a child heading into the world, a father hoping he has handed over the keys to survive the road. It borrows the old Irish blessing and has the good manners not to over-sing it. I defy a parent to reach the end with a dry eye.

Between the heartbreak numbers, "Break My Heart" and "Beautiful Heart" show the band's range. The first is a wounded, accusatory howl of a love gone sour. The second is a bruised lament for someone who let go, and it asks, with real delicacy, whether the weight was simply too much. "All Night Long" supplies the release, a joyride of dice, bells, a record-store car park in Los Angeles and Nick Cave on the stereo. After so much soul-searching, its sheer abandon feels like opening a window.

The credits explain the polish. Dylan Medina produced, Ben Worsey recorded at Everland in Five Dock, and the mix, by Tim Palmer, of Pearl Jam, U2 and Bowie fame, and Travis Kennedy at Prism Horse Studios in Austin, Texas, carries a gift for big skies and close-up intimacy. Leon Zervos mastered it at 301. The additional hands of Evie Corradin on bass, Seb Kruisheer on piano and organ and Shane McLaughlin on guitar widen the frame without crowding it. All of this was done independently, with no label to flatter or hurry the work, and you can hear the freedom in it.

Folk-rock has always been the music of people telling the truth in plain clothes. Josh Orange tell it with unusual courage, moving from the ruin of the world to the ruin of the self and out the other side to something close to gratitude. For a band that has spent two decades waiting at the edge of the room, this is a triumphant arrival. If you can see them play the whole album in Sydney on 26 November, do.