Confession dressed as pop record, or pop record dressed as confession — either way, DARNELL has built something rare: a breakup song that refuses the comforts of villainy. Most songs of this genre arrive armed, ready to indict an absent other. This one turns the blade inward, and the wound it opens is more interesting for it.

Twenty tracks is a lot of evidence to submit on one's own behalf, and Dorian, an independent artist who has built his following one TikTok clip and one streaming playlist at a time, submits it without flinching — and the evidence holds up. *The Collection* arrives billed as a "best of," a claim usually reserved for careers with rather more grey hair attached to them, but pop's timeline has compressed so dramatically that a few years of consistent, well-loved releases now genuinely earns a victory lap. Played end to end, the record makes its own case convincingly: this is a catalogue worth gathering up, not padding out.

Some comebacks announce themselves with a fanfare. Others creep up on you, quietly insistent, like a half-remembered melody hummed in the shower decades after you last sang it properly. Mister Chorister's "Spark" belongs firmly to the latter camp, and it's all the better for it.