Steve Gunn plays guitar like people used to sign their names with quill and ink. His lines are long and looping, swiped through with flourishes and filigree that communicate in decoration what can’t be communicated in language. No matter the context—noisy improv, hearty indie rock, pastoral folk—his melodies feel like rags, like something you’d hear barreling from a player piano. But Gunn tends to play this music at a luxuriating pace, expressing emotions that might otherwise be shadowed by virtuosity. You might be tempted to call his music archeological if it didn’t feel so personal; it’s like with each flick of a finger, he’s brushing off years of dust. On Daylight Daylight, his first singer-songwriter album since 2021’s Other You, he exhales with a set of twilit, awestruck songs that testify to life in the shadow of death.

For Gunn, mortality isn’t something to be feared so much as witnessed. He has characterized the tone of these songs as being “about a hopeful death, a death where you don’t have to be afraid of renewal.” You can hear this in the music, in the patient and loving way he carries these songs from bloom to decay. The sense of loss is palpable, but any kind of angst has long drained away. Taking a note from Talk Talk’s twin masterpieces Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, Gunn and longtime collaborator James Elkington make generous use of space in a way that suggests the velvety stillness of the cosmos. The pair passed these seven songs back and forth, with Elkington shaping and augmenting Gunn’s demos, before building them up together at Elkington’s Nada Studios. As a result, the album has the carefully handled feel of an antique restoration, even as it aims to draw the listener outside of time.

Coy intrigue has always been part of the magic of Gunn’s music; he’s more likely to draw you in close than to blow your hair back. He emphasizes his most subtle qualities on Daylight Daylight, and the songs feel like they’re being played for the benefit of one person. Much of this is due to the way Gunn’s melodies dapple and drift in and out of shadow, a quality Elkington’s arrangements underscore. Isolate the acoustic-guitar clang in “Nearly There” and you might hear the opening chime of Primal Scream’s “Movin’ on Up.” Drop it back in among Elkington’s strings, which have the diffused beauty of sunlight seen through a squint, and they take on a disarming sweetness. So much of Daylight Daylight feels this way: majestic enough to fill a theater but contained and domestic. Listening to it can feel like staring into an expertly arranged terrarium; it’s remarkable how so much beauty can take up so little space.

Gunn takes obvious pleasure in crafting these miniatures. “Morning on K Road” was written after he spent a serendipitous afternoon with Hamish Kilgour of legendary New Zealand indie-rock legends the Clean shortly before his death in 2022. The pair, who had known one another in New York, ran into one another on the street in Auckland. Images of the day flicker through the lyrics like memories dissolving (“Painted leather jacket when you were crossing the street”) in the warmth of Gunn’s strumming and the downy bed of strings. From a plot perspective, nothing much happens; the pair mostly just walk around. But the song hangs with the crackling energy of unexpected pleasantry. “The morning felt special,” Gunn sings. “Like it was meant to be.”

Daylight Daylight is often shadowed by a feeling of finality. “Already the sky is singing/Already the bells are ringing,” Gunn sings in “Nearly There,” his voice reassuring as he ushers his beloved toward an afterlife. Dandelion puffs of woodwinds float in the amber light of “Another Fade” as Gunn picks out a casual, almost absentminded solo. It’s an off-handed moment, the kind you share with a friend so close you don’t have to say much when you’re together. “I feel the dream slip away,” Gunn sings, “And try to go back.”

But you can’t go back, something Gunn seems to accept throughout Daylight Daylight. Its songs hold people and moments lovingly in place, turning them around, examining their hidden parts. “Take your world upside down/Before the day begins,” he instructs in the final track, “A Walk.” It’s the only abstraction in its lyrics; the rest of the song is a set of instructions for an early-morning stroll. He points out a forest clearing, guides the listener to a particular rock, soaks up the still air. The song is full of life, but the intricate bend and weave of his guitar has no particular destination in mind. He’s moving slowly, assuring you there’s enough time to take it all in.