Let's get the obvious comparison out of the way, because it will follow this record everywhere it goes and Brown may as well make peace with it now. Yes, it sounds like Depeche Mode. More specifically, it sounds like what Depeche Mode might have sounded like had Dave Gahan grown up in the East Midlands nursing a grievance rather than in Basildon nursing a grievance — which, admittedly, is a distinction without much of a difference. The vocal in particular carries that same cold, declarative authority; the kind of voice that doesn't plead so much as *present evidence*. And yet here is the genuinely interesting part: Brown achieves this effect without a single synthesiser or keyboard in sight. Every texture you hear is wrung from guitar, bass, and digitally constructed percussion. The 80s atmospherics are conjured entirely through arrangement and attitude. That is not a small achievement.

The song's subject matter is as old as romantic disappointment itself — a man who feels he has invested more in a relationship than he is getting back, reduced to the status of a plaything, an object to be picked up and discarded at someone else's convenience. Brown wisely resists the urge to make this a howl of self-pity. The tone is cooler than that, more forensic. He is not begging. He is cataloguing. The emotional temperature sits somewhere between resignation and barely contained contempt, which is, if we're being precise about these things, a far more interesting register than straightforward heartbreak.

What Brown has done with the production is equally noteworthy. By his own account, he pushed the bass and beat to the foreground on this track, and the decision pays dividends. The low end has genuine weight — it doesn't merely support the song, it drives it, gives it a physical presence that a lot of bedroom-recorded independent music conspicuously lacks. The rhythm section pounds with the kind of dull, relentless insistence that mirrors the song's emotional state perfectly. This is music that has been ground down and is grinding back.

The backstory matters here, too, though not in a sentimental way. This is a man who played in ska bands as a teenager, sold his guitars when family finances demanded it, and spent the better part of two decades away from music before a saxophone gifted by his late mother reignited something. *Surely* is his tenth album. Let that number sit for a moment. Ten albums recorded in a home studio, self-composed, self-performed, self-produced, with no label infrastructure and no publicist sending copies to the right people at the right time. The sheer bloody-mindedness of it is remarkable.

*Toy* represents a genuine artistic pivot — darker, stranger, further from the ska-inflected pop of his earlier work than Brown himself apparently anticipated. That element of self-surprise is usually a reliable indicator that an artist has pushed somewhere worthwhile. You don't stumble into genuinely new territory by playing it safe.

The old school friend in Australia who heard this and told Brown he could have been a gothic god in the 80s was not wrong. She was also, it should be noted, about forty years too late with the information. The consolation is that Brown is making music now that could stand alongside the records she was presumably comparing it to — and he's doing it entirely on his own terms, in his own studio, in Swadlincote. 

The music press would do well to catch up.