Sleepy Hollow's second album “The Trapdoor” is an unsettlingly simple affair. It's set in a peculiarly American landscape, a 24-hour paper-chase mission through a half-closed office: a song is written, and a recording is made. Three days before the release of the album, a friend of Sleepy Hollow, the music producer and composer Jamie Barlow, is murdered, and the album is released as a surprise, a lonely, electronic-music confluence.

The album’s title, “The Trapdoor,” seems to be a reference to the phrase “the trap door is open,” and it’s hard to imagine it’s not a metaphor for what happens when you open the locked door of the mind of someone you don’t know. It’s not a black and white portrait of lawlessness, but the tension between the two, the justification and the horror, the dawn and the dusk.

The album’s most obvious critique is its unvarnished lyricism, which asks the listener to find the thread of a song’s theme, to let the sounds in the song wash over you like a cloudy, extraterrestrial blanket. The album’s best tracks, like “The Outlaw,” rely on moods and melodies that are often ineffably seductive. The song’s opening is a lullaby, an eulogy from a man in a wheelchair, a mid-century country-rock instrument. The gentle, mournful harmony, fades in the same way that the title of the first track’s opener fades into the background. It’s the same feeling that a steady stream of sound files from the office finds you at night — the hum of static and flicker of light. And the album’s best moments, like “The Trapdoor,” are the ones where the album reminds you of the vast, empty realms that lie beyond the window.