Raphael Saadiq has been smooth so long that it’s practically his signature: that creamy falsetto, the dapper suits, the retro classicism repurposed for a new era. Then who’s that singing on his latest album, “Jimmy Lee” (Columbia)?

At times, the multi-instrumentalist-producer-songwriter with the joyous, flexible falsetto sounds like a much older, raspier vocalist on his fifth solo album, broken by time and circumstance. His subject matter is explicit and personal, the album a song cycle brimming with ghosts — four siblings who died tragically young.

The album is named after his brother Jimmy Lee Baker, a drug addict who died of AIDS in 1990, but the narrators in these songs are more like a collection of lost voices, including that of Saadiq himself.

To call “Jimmy Lee” a departure for the artist, born Charles Wiggins 53 years ago in Oakland, would be an understatement. He has been recording and producing hits since the ’80s, as a solo artist, band leader (most notably with hitmakers Tony! Toni! Tone!) and collaborator with artists such as D’Angelo, Solange, Mary J. Blige and Erykah Badu. He’s cut a wide swath through contemporary R&B, but the murkier, more anguished tone struck by the new album stakes out forbidding, previously unexplored territory.

“When a sinner’s praying, God, will you hear it?” Saadiq cries on the opening track, which sets the tone of entrapment and desperation that encloses many of his narrators. It’s not that Saadiq has abandoned his feel for rhythm and melody — finger snaps and a bubbling bass line point “Sinner’s Prayer” toward the dance floor – but the words feel unscripted, a stream of anguish.

“So Ready” is even more adventurous; it sounds like it was recorded underwater, as if the singer were drowning, and his exhaled breaths became part of the rhythm. On “This World is Drunk,” the perspective shifts, with a brother eulogizing a sibling, sadness clinging to every note.

Much in the way Lou Reed wrote about addiction in his best songs, Saadiq personalizes the drug — it is a suitor not easily dismissed.

That brings a chill to “Something Keeps Calling,” in which he deploys his falsetto to illustrate how insidious addiction can be. “Kings Fall,” in many ways the album’s most haunting song, reads like a confession from a deathbed, a last will and testament amid hallucinatory tangents (“I could see witches flyin’ everywhere”). By the end, the junkie begs for deliverance, only to hear the doorbell ring as it announces his dealer making one more drop.

“My Walk” pairs gospel call-and-response vocals with a reverberating electronic undercurrent as it describes a lonely life of constant movement. “Found by the bay” becomes a refrain that suggests a death march, until the bravado-spewing protagonist collapses.

In the end, Saadiq masterfully widens the lens once more with “Rikers Island,” which describes the mass incarceration of African American men in one of the country’s most notorious prisons. The singer testifies about a boy shaking in a courtroom as he awaits a judge’s verdict. It’s an anecdote that illustrates the toll taken by a U.S. policy to make punishment a priority over rehabilitation of drug users. A gospel choir rises behind him. They represent the voices of all the lost boys everywhere, including the ones in Saadiq’s own family.

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.