Will Sheff doesn’t have a good voice in the traditional sense. His tenor is flat and prone to quavering when he aims for volume or falsetto, which is often. At other times, Mr. Sheff sounds less like he’s singing and more like he’s speaking, merely allowing the musicality of his words to carry the tune. But every time he opens his mouth, the singer-songwriter powering Austin, Texas’s folk-leaning indie pop outfit Okkervil River sounds like he’s in the midst of a religious experience. In the 10 years since making their debut, Mr. Sheff and Okkervil River have slowly amassed a portfolio of critically fawning reviews and a growing army of converts who gravitate toward Mr. Sheff’s literary worldview and keening self-awareness.

“The Stand Ins,” Okkervil River’s fifth album, which is released today on Jagjaguwar Records, should do nothing to quell the band’s critical adoration or its ever-growing mass of minions. A thematic companion and sequel to 2007’s “The Stage Names” — itself an emotionally wrenching album that explored, and often lamented, the public mask of fame — “The Stand Ins” continues Mr. Sheff’s florid, lyrical mix of modestly obscure fact with creative fiction. Through its 11 songs — four of which are instrumental title tracks — Okkervil River bears down on mundane fraudulence. Just as “The Stage Names” uses its theatrical title as a thematic allusion, “The Stand Ins” plays with the titular idea of film and television performers who stand in for stars during filmmaking’s less glamorous blocking and technical setups, which Mr. Sheff extrapolates into life itself.

The album’s second song, the shimmying “Lost Coastlines,” sets up this theme. Mr. Sheff sings about embarking on a sailing voyage to who knows where. Buoyed by a bouncing bass line and skipping drum beat, the singer paints an image of a vessel loaded with passengers, but without a clear destination. “Lost Coastlines” becomes a hollow pantomime of an odyssey that’s going nowhere, and does so with exuberant joy.

It’s an idea that is acidly reiterated in “Singer Songwriter,” a carousing folk-rock ditty about the empty good taste of idle wealth. It is a heady middle finger that Mr. Sheff echoes in “Pop Lie,” an up-tempo rocker in which he points out the obvious shallowness of pop: “He’s the liar who lied in his pop song / and you’re lying when you sing along.”

That chorus may be Okkervil River reduced to 16 words. One would be hard-pressed to find a rock singer more drunk on allusion than Mr. Sheff, but he uses his emotional connection with his craft not to flaunt his erudition — as is so often the case in art, from novels to criticism to pop songs — but to acknowledge the artifice of writing: Why explain a feeling, a situation, a person, or an idea, when a cultural allusion can convey it in a few extracted words? It’s neither a cheap nor a lazy ploy in Mr. Sheff’s hands, as it frees him to self-reflexively consider this very artifice in his chosen art form. In “Pop Lie,” he crafts a rollicking dissection of the calculated, commercial feelings of pop songs that joyously begs people to sing along knowingly with it.* * *

Right now, Mr. Sheff and Okkervil River are delivering one of the most successful fusions of intellectual ennui and folk pop in independent music. The brothers Bubba and Matt Kadane, however, continue to offer one of the most unique sounds in all of contemporary rock. As they did in their 1990s band Bedhead, the Kadanes find emotional and visceral catharsis in extreme simplicity with their five-piece band the New Year, which today releases its third album, the self-titled “The New Year” (Touch and Go Records).

The Kadanes — the Dallas-based guitarist Bubba and the Ithaca, N.Y.-based guitarist-singer Matt — never met a three-chord riff they couldn’t improve by streamlining it to two. “Stark” is the Kadanes’ operating ideal, echoed from the music to the lyrics and right down to the band’s artwork. On the new album, the band hatches yet another rippling statement in its intricately orchestrated aesthetic. The New Year — which also includes drummer Chris Brokaw, bassist Mike Donofrio, and guitarist Peter Schmidt — is one of the few bands that doesn’t need to expand or evolve its sound; it can always find fecund new details in its minimalist baroque.

Granted, “The New Year” finds the band maintaining tempos that feel downright frenetic compared with its typical dying heartbeat pulse — see “X Off Days,” the throbbing “The Door Opens,” and the cataclysmic closer “The Idea of You” — but don’t mistake a slight upswing in tempo for a change in approach. The Kadanes’s songwriting blueprint is one of artful layering and stripping away, treating a song the way an abstract painter treats a canvas. And just as a composition occasionally needs a little more cadmium red, the New Year here needed a little more oomph.

As such, “The Door Opens” and “The Idea of You” are the arresting moments here, like slashes of pigment flung from a palette knife. In the former, Matt Kadane fuses the song’s title and attitude in the lyrical bridge — “The door opens and all hell breaks loose” — and the song follows suit. Mr. Brokaw’s hi-hat backing texture is flooded by a fuzztone bass punch and three darting, interweaving guitar lines. In “The Idea of You,” the undistorted guitar strum that opens the song is leveled by the eruption of noise that arrives with the chorus.

Even such blasts, though, are used sparingly and are controlled to convey a devastatingly emotional rift. Just as emptiness is an integral part of the New Year’s music and visual appeal, it is also part of Matt Kadane’s lyrical world. “Seven Days and Seven Nights” is an appeal to freeze a fleeting moment, to escape the inexorable pull of time. He observes that “eight hours of sleep can make anything go away” in the lilting, haunted arpeggios of “Wages of Sleep.” And he sleepwalks through the queasily familiar in “My Neighborhood,” as finely and economically articulated a statement on American disenchantment as anything by Raymond Carver.