Bobby Gillespie, lead singer of Primal Scream, has teamed up with Jehnny Beth of Savages for their first collaborative endeavor, Utopian Ashes, a gorgeously grim and gray project. Its alt-rock styles feature a string of songs situated around a crumbling relationship. With the inevitable end of a marriage in sight, the musicians grapple with broken hearts and the inability to articulate or express emotions. It’s a refined and eloquently composed album, running only nine songs in length as the duo’s light vocals and arrangements display high levels of collaboration and raw talent.

Now, it should be noted that Utopian Ashes is a concept album, built around the duo’s shared love of bruised country duets; it’s an anti-“Islands in the Stream.” Gillespie and Beth never dated, let alone married. The stories are based on characters they created. But they were also joined by their respective musical families: frequent Jehnny Beth bassist Johnny Hostile and Primal Scream’s Andrew Innes (guitar), Martin Duffy (piano) and Darrin Mooney (drums).

The album begins with “Chase It Down,” Gillespie’s breathy vocals guided first by a funky  riff and then by steady strumming and layers of orchestral strings and Beth’s accompaniment on the chorus. The lyrics recount chasing after a love that should have been given up on. It’s one of the more upbeat tracks on the album, moving at a steady pace with an anthemic post-chorus, giving the false illusion the couple may work things out.

However, by the second song, “English Town,” it’s clear the story the album is centered on. Gillespie leads this track, a Leonard-Cohen-like waltz, as well, as he does most of the album, singing of “feral kids on zombie drugs” and hoping he doesn’t “die in this cold English town tonight.” It’s gray and grim, much like the standard picture of Glasgow, from which Gillespie hails. Even the more lighthearted “la la la’s” during the bridge can’t bring the song away from its morbid style, buried in the cold, hard ground.

Single “Remember We Were Lovers” starts with slow drumming and guitar playing, immediately sounding downtrodden and broken. “Am I a fool to still want you?/ After all that we’ve been through/ We’re martyrs in a marriage/ In a war we’re gonna lose,” Jehnny Beth and Bobbie Gillespie sing.

On “Your Heart Will Always Be Broken,” Beth leads the song with Gillespie’s vocals coming in during the end of the first chorus and working to support her’s. Starting with a single guitar strum and integrating with light piano work, it’s over six minutes long and worth every minute. The duo’s voices work well together when harmonizing, while also effectively countering one another in style and perspective. It concludes in a cacophony of sound as Gillespie’s voice shrouds itself in the shadows and inescapable brokenness.

“You Don’t Know What Love Is” follows, beginning with such a depressing line that if it weren’t for the fluidity and talent of the artists, it would be too much to bear. “Sometimes I think that love is a disease like addiction/ At first ecstatic taste that we chase into oblivion,” Gillespie sings while breathing heavily over a melancholic piano. He talks of the pain of living and the feeling of love that no one is giving.

“Living a Lie” begins like a sparkling and mystical fairytale, but right away, Gillespie reminds us this is a breakup album, so the seemingly lighthearted music is not about a happily-ever-after. “I’m hurting baby, but so are you/ It’s time to say goodbye,” he sings in the opening verse. He and Jehnny Beth approach the topic from opposing perspectives, creating both revealing and complicated characters for themselves. “You tried to get to heaven/ But you ain’t got no religion,” he wails, as Beth echoes in the background, “You come home deranged, acting guilty and strange.”

“Sunk in Reverie” concludes the album, an eerie and reminiscent song, kicking in with a mid-tempo acoustic guitar. Gillespie sings of experiencing a spiritual concussion from “all those trashy, tacky people” falling at his lover’s feet. Recounting the fake, blood-sucking vampires one encounters at a party (code for appropriators and posers), it effectively concludes an album that feels entirely soaked in gray mist and billows of fog.

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