Singer-songwriters burrowed deep into the studio in the 1970s, making literate, obsessively crafted records that often embraced chaos even as their detailed surfaces invited listeners’ meditation. As The Greencards’ new Viridian demonstrates, the well-made pop record is alive and well in Nashville, colored with today’s fashionable acoustic-music pigments. In every sense a gorgeous production, Viridian communicates artful disquiet.

For the trio, the record represents a distillation of the strengths of their two previous records, 2003’s Movin’ On and Weather and Water, from 2005. As mandolin player Kym Warner puts it, “On the first record, it was more about the vibe of the song as opposed to what the song is actually about.”

Viridian’s songs were carefully chosen. “As the band’s developed, it’s become more about the content,” says Warner. “Going into this record, we’ve drawn on people like Neil Young much more, people who are just artists and who write songs, as opposed to just flash picking.”

This doesn’t mean that Viridian doesn’t contain flashy picking: the group’s grasp of song form is matched by disciplined, intelligent playing, and instrumental prowess is part of their allure.

“Our show would suffer if we didn’t have those aspects where we jam out,” Warner says. “Everybody needs to breathe, and spread out a bit, and then it’s great to come back and play a song, in its entirety, no jamming and no extra notes.”

Movin’ On was an impressive debut that began with a jazzy instrumental, “Jolly Hockeysticks,” written by Warner and Greencards fiddler and viola player Eamon McLoughlin. Meanwhile, the title track was a honky blues sung in a relaxed yet pleading voice by Carol Young, the group’s bassist and main vocalist.

Clearly, the group had range and ambition, as befit three expatriates (Young and Warner are Australian, while McLoughlin is English) playing what amounted to a revisionist take on a heroic era of American music. “My parents are Irish, and the Irish love their country music as well as their traditional Irish music,” McLoughlin says. “So, in our house, it was always country and Irish. My dad had a country band in London that all the kids played in, from an early age. There was a solid grounding in traditional music and country, like George Jones, Charley Pride, Buck Owens.”

Young chalked up a couple of Australian No. 1 country singles before moving to Austin, Texas, where she would meet Warner and McLoughlin. The trio developed a strong following in Austin, where McLoughlin had already played with Ray Wylie Hubbard and Bruce Robison. Landing a deal with Dualtone in 2005, they released Weather and Water, which featured the sublime “Long Way Down,” a hard, concentrated waltz that recalled English folk-rockers Fairport Convention.

Viridian plays up Young’s big, smooth, slightly indolent voice in a way the previous records didn’t. Some of Movin’ On and Weather seemed arch, even if the contrast between Young’s conventionally beautiful singing and Warner’s and McLoughlin’s more idiosyncratic vocals put the records squarely in the singer-songwriter tradition. Viridian is a perfectly paced collection of 12 unified but subtly different songs, as if it were 1972 all over again.

“When we listened to [Viridian], there was a great feeling of anticipation,” Young says. “How are people gonna receive this? We knew it was a little bit different, but not so much as to alienate the crowd. And then, when we were deciding on the track order, putting ‘Waiting on the Night’ first was a punt, really, ’cause that was the only track to put first.”

Young is right: “Waiting on the Night” is as compelling an opening track since, say, “Sail Away” led off Randy Newman’s album of the same name. It’s bluesy without being a blues, and sexy because it’s never overdone. And there’s a sense that the good times Young sings about here have been earned, and at no little cost. It’s masterful pop: “To be young and living life / Free as a bird in the sky / I got nothing but time,” Young sings.

As does nearly all of Viridian, the song features Chris Carmichael’s superb string arrangements, which comment upon and open up the songs. As a result, the record feels organic. There’s a tension not present on the group’s earlier records, and the trio sound more focused. As is “Waiting,” the songs are easeful, ironic and slightly conflicted, and bounce off each other in unexpected ways.

“River of Sand,” written by Warner and David Mead, blossoms into high-grade country songwriting, while “Who Knows,” by Young, Warner and Ronnie Bowman, rocks out as hard as Hank Williams Jr. or any neo-traditional rowdy number you’d care to name. When Warner jumps in with a crazed mandolin solo, it signifies something beyond just a bit of exotica.

“We kind of road-tested [the songs] in the studio,” Warner says. “This record was made live. We were in the same room, and didn’t work out our parts too critically before we went in. We sat down, for sure, and played through songs, worked out something of an arrangement, and figured out what we could add. But we decided we were gonna just capture the performance.”

The result is a record whose songs—mostly written by The Greencards, with three crucial contributions from Jedd Hughes, who Warner describes as “the secret fourth member of the band”—gain resonance as they’re sequenced, with Carmichael’s astringent strings the secret heart of Viridian. “All the Way From Italy” tells the tale of a “little town in the Lombardy” the narrator leaves. Like “River of Sand,” this is first-rate country songwriting on a new level, where northern Italy becomes as down-home as Tennessee.

Elsewhere, “Su Prabhat” is an ingenious fiddle tune that McLoughlin and Robbie Gjersoe wrote in tribute to a sitar salutation Gjersoe was listening to one morning on tour. “It’s nothing that would have appeared on either of the other two records,” McLoughlin says. The lush “I Don’t Want to Lose You” is stately pop, while “When I Was in Love With You” features a McLoughlin vocal that wouldn’t sound out of place on Richard Thompson’s 1972 Henry the Human Fly.

This eclecticism suits a band whose great theme might be the seductions of rootlessness. Although they make their records in Nashville (Viridian was produced by Doug Lancio, and mixed by Gary Paczosa), and live in the city, their allegiances might lie elsewhere. “We’ve been here for two years, and it’s where we work,” Young says. “We’ve met a lot of great people. But it still feels like home when I go to Austin.”

One gets the sense that The Greencards simply outgrew Austin, just as they felt compelled to come to America in search of a musical reality they’d apprehended at some remove from the action. “We could play shows there five nights a week, make a living,” Young says of Austin. “They call it the Velvet Rut.”

Still, the move to Nashville was a huge decision. “It was a little daunting,” Warner says. “You look at all the records and the guys who play the music we love, like Jerry Douglas or Sam Bush, and it was, like, we can’t find a gig there.” And, as Warner says, the group wasn’t sure how they’d be perceived in Nashville: “Being Australian, I thought that unless you were trying to make a go of it in the commercial country scene, Nashville wasn’t the place.”

If groups like The Greencards and The Duhks share producers and an aesthetic, they also revitalize a shared, hybrid idiom. In a sense, many new acoustic groups sell an image of gentility to an audience that equates fiddles and mandolins with authenticity. At their best, as on The Duhks’ “Dance Hall Girls,” The Mammals’ “Please Come In,” and The Greencards’ “Waiting on the Night,” these groups are far from genteel: the restraint of their approach only underlines the passion of their constraint.

For The Greencards, the world is reassuringly rough-and-tumble, and their pop perfectionism coexists with a casual, workmanlike attitude toward the music they perform. Viridian repays the patient listener with a huge amount of carefully rendered detail, and the group sounds alive to possibility. “A few mistakes actually made it onto the record, and later they became some of my favorite bits,” Young says. “You know, before, I didn’t know if I could live with that sort of thing.”