What follows is one of the more architecturally assured singles to emerge from the psych-pop underground this year — a record that wears its debts openly and without apology. Cornu has spoken of honouring the Beach Boys between 1967 and 1971, that extraordinary window when Brian Wilson's genius curdled beautifully into something stranger and more orchestral, and the homage is unmistakeable. But homage, done well, is its own form of originality, and *Down the West Coast* does it very well indeed.

The percussion is the thing that catches you first on repeated listens. Light kick drums, placed with almost surgical precision, provide the scaffolding over which everything else accumulates. This is not a record that bludgeons. It accumulates — layer by careful layer, the way fog rolls in over a bay you could have sworn was clear a moment ago. By the time the choir arrives, swelling beneath a repeated lyrical refrain that has by then lodged itself somewhere behind your sternum, the tidal wave Cornu has been assembling finally breaks, and it is genuinely, unexpectedly moving.

The lead vocal navigates the same tightrope that all good psychedelic pop must walk: the line between otherworldly and intimate, between the cosmic and the kitchen-sink. Cornu's harmonies — bright, intentional, stacked with a confidence that belies the project's modest independent origins — push the arrangement toward something almost liturgical in its last third. The choir does not overwhelm; it consecrates. The distinction matters.

References arrive willingly, and the press materials duly flag Tame Impala and MGMT alongside the Beach Boys, but *Down the West Coast* sits most comfortably in the company of the Baroque pop tradition at its most earnest: Scott Walker circa *Scott 4*, Harry Nilsson on a particularly lucid afternoon, the left-field orchestrations of Van Dyke Parks. The woodwinds, consciously drawn from a 1950s palette, do something curious: they make the record feel simultaneously archival and contemporary, a museum exhibit that somehow remains alive to the touch.

Moon Construction Kit has produced a single of rare sonic intelligence, a record that understands the past without being imprisoned by it, and that arrives — like all the best music — sounding both inevitable and entirely itself. *Down the West Coast* is the work of someone who has listened very hard and learned very well. The rest, you suspect, is only a matter of time.