On paper, it shouldn’t have worked. An emo concept album about a failing relationship loosely based on the singer’s own divorce doesn’t exactly sound like a formula for a hit record.

Lucky for all of us though, Cursive’s Domestica manages to avoid all of the self-indulgence and clunky storytelling that too many concept albums fail to avoid. Instead, it shows a huge leap forward in both Tim Kasher’s songwriting and the band’s musicianship, leading to an undisputed emo masterpiece.

Domestica is, for lack of a better term, an emo rock opera, chronicling the fights, failures, and infidelity of a relationship between two characters, called only Sweetie and Pretty Baby in the lyrics. It’s the exact kind of small-scale, high-stakes drama that has always informed emo’s lyrics, so it was inevitable that someone would stretch the theme into a cohesive narrative.

For my own part, when I was first downloading Cursive songs on Limewire (or Bearshare or KaZaa or whichever P2P service wasn’t overloaded with viruses that month), I gravitated mostly toward tracks from this album. “The Casualty” and “The Martyr” in particular were in heavy rotation, featured on several of my emo mixes burned to CD-Rs (kids today don’t know about burning CDs). That said, I can’t remember if I ever had a copy of this album, or explain why I wouldn’t have bought a copy before this one, but far more of the songs sound familiar than I was expecting.

Part of that is thanks to the huge jump in maturity between this album and its predecessors. There’s still no shortage of dissonant melodies and explosive bursts of emotional combustion, but the composition is much more controlled—even at its most chaotic. There is a definite shift in the relationship between the instruments and the vocals from albums before. Kasher’s delivery is far more theatrical, shifting melodies between lines instead of a typical verse-chorus format, and the instrumentation follows him more as an accompaniment. It’s not quite musical theater, but if someone were to write an emo Broadway play, it would sound an awful lot like this. This is especially strong in “Making Friends and Acquaintances” and “The Casualty,” but bits of it bleed into most tracks.

But even when they’re not playing emo show tunes, the songs are just good. “A Red So Deep” rides a repeating bass groove while guitar feedback floats above it, both untethered from the burden of chord changes. “Shallow Means, Deep Ends” is even catchy, with an added dose of Fugazi influence (which, it should be noted, is a huge plus from me).

However, the music ultimately plays a supporting role to the overarching narrative. “The Casualty” opens with a portrait of the couple’s uneasiness: pictures of too many drinks and emotional landmines fill the background. “The Martyr” closes in on the male partner, Sweetie,  given to drunken self-destruction and self-pity. Then, in “Making Friends and Acquaintances,” his partner, Pretty Baby, meets a man who she later sleeps with in “A Red So Deep“—a decision that ultimately leads to her feeling even worse about herself in “The Ballad of Pretty Baby.” When she is discovered, Sweetie challenges her callousness toward her with his own in “The Game of Who Needs Who the Worst,” which ends in a stalemate between the two in “The Radiator Hums.”

The album comes to an ambiguous close with the dramatic, cathartic close with “The Night I Lost the Will to Fight,” which finds the narrator resigning to the fate of his doomed relationship. In interviews, Kasher has said that the characters stay together in the end, despite the pain they’ve put each other through.

Ultimately though, tracing each plot point in the story isn’t necessary to enjoy the album. The specific events are often vague enough that the music can be heard on its own impressive merit, making this an album that is rewarding both at casual and close listens. And in the larger scheme of their catalogue, this is the album where—to me at least—Cursive really became Cursive.