Opening on a single guitar figure that is simultaneously skeletal and loaded with intent, *Bright Young Thing* establishes its mood within the first four bars. This is not the sound of a man hedging his bets. The riff — all nervous angular energy, somewhere between early-period Interpol and a Wire track that has been left out in the Belgian rain — sets up a tension that the rest of the song spends its four-odd minutes gloriously, agonisingly refusing to fully resolve. That is not a criticism. That is the craft.

Vanherreweghe's vocal performance here is the best of his recorded career to date. Where earlier Goat Boat material occasionally suggested an artist still searching for the exact register in which to place his anxieties, on *Bright Young Thing* he sounds settled in his own skin, which — paradoxically — makes the lyrical restlessness all the more affecting. He is singing about youth, specifically the uncomfortable moment when the mythology of youth — the freedom, the potential, the glorious untethered feeling of not yet having become anything fixed — curdles into something more complicated. The titular bright young thing is not celebrated. Nor is it exactly mourned. It is examined, held up to a particular quality of northern European light, and found to be both beautiful and quietly devastating. Think the first half of your twenties described by someone now wise enough to know what they did not know then.

The production, characteristically DIY in its origins but startlingly polished in its execution, leans into contrast. The verses are close and almost claustrophobic — the vocal pressed forward, the guitar restrained to its essential architecture — before the chorus opens the whole thing up like a window thrown wide in a stifling room. It is a manoeuvre deployed with precision rather than accident, which speaks to the years Vanherreweghe has spent alone in late-night recording sessions, learning the hard way which choices matter and which are merely noise.

What is most admirable about *Bright Young Thing* is its refusal of comfort. Lesser artists, having found a chorus this immediately infectious, would have buried it under layers of instrumentation and reverb until the sharp edges were safely sanded down. Goat Boat does the opposite. The track gets rawer as it progresses, the guitar more insistent, the arrangement more exposed, as if the song itself is shedding pretence in real time. By the final thirty seconds, it is essentially just Vanherreweghe and the instrument, and the effect is genuinely arresting — the sonic equivalent of watching someone say something they have been rehearsing for years and meaning every syllable of it.

For those who have tracked this project since its early releases — the ones that earned a *Cutting Edge Magazine* Best New Talent nomination before the years of rotating bandmates and stalled momentum — *Bright Young Thing* represents something more than a strong single. It is the moment a story finds its proper shape. The pivot to solo performance, the Humo's Rock Rally selection, the headline show at Ghent's Damberd: all of it now reads as prologue to this. The engine, as Vanherreweghe himself has suggested, is finally running. On this evidence, it is running very fast indeed.

British indie rock spent the better part of two decades searching for artists who understood that economy and intensity are not opposites. Belgium, it turns out, has been quietly doing the work.