The album artwork tells you almost everything you need to know before a note plays. Created in collaboration with artist Calum Hall, it derives from a photograph taken by Birch's own father in 2016 — his mother and the family dog, Skye, standing among the Glengorm Standing Stones on Mull, rendered through a cyanotype filter until it looks like something retrieved from the bottom of the sea. Family, memory, place: these are the co-ordinates of the entire record. That the image was taken by a father, of a mother, at stones that predate recorded history by millennia, gives the whole enterprise a geological quality. These songs did not happen quickly. Neither did the people and landscapes that shaped them.

Birch is originally from Inverclyde — that stretch of post-industrial Clyde coast where the light turns pewter for weeks at a time — and is now settled on the Isle of Mull, a migration that has clearly reorganised him at the level of instinct. Geography matters enormously here. His songs feel informed as much by weather and landscape as by memory, playing out with space around them, allowing feeling to arrive at its own pace. This is music for which silence and mood speak as clearly as lyrics, and producer Dylan Cooper — whose credits elsewhere include Charli XCX and Anne-Marie, which tells you something about the range of the man — understands perfectly that the best thing you can do with a song like this is get out of its way.

The album opens with "Fly Us Both Away" and the cryptically titled "HDN1" before arriving at the title track, and that sequencing rewards patience. By the time "Weight Will Unwind" lands at track three, the record has already established its emotional grammar: intimate, unhurried, alive to the texture of the ordinary. The title track itself, recorded live at An Tobar and Mull Theatre, carries the subtle depth of a shared acoustic space, sound moving through a real room rather than existing only in software. It was written, according to Birch, on a stormy evening in a farmhouse kitchen, and its mood mirrors that setting exactly — hushed, patient, reflective. Layered backing vocals, live room warmth, and soft synth textures are given room to breathe rather than being pressed into service.

"Inside Your Mind" arrives at track four and pulls in a different direction. Birch has spoken of wanting this one to feel constantly in motion — about the desire to understand another person completely, with the music itself taking over and amplifying that yearning into something larger than its origins. It works. If the title track is the record breathing out, this is the moment it holds its breath. Soundville called it one of the most tender songs you will hear, and the description is not extravagant.

"I Want You", a song that has apparently lived with Birch for the better part of a decade, occupies track five and may be the album's most quietly devastating moment. Time has done something interesting to it. The urgency of young love has been replaced by a more considered tenderness, the romantic feeling still present but refracted now through experience. Writing a song about longing that does not tip into melodrama is a considerable technical achievement; doing so when the longing is partly for a version of yourself that no longer quite exists is something else again.

The record's second half — "The River", "Two Magpies", "Hebridean Eyes", "Skim Stones", "Change the Sheets" — pursues similar emotional territory without exhausting it. "Two Magpies" carries the weight of its folk symbolism lightly; "Hebridean Eyes" is exactly what you would expect from the title and is better for it, a piece of topographical songwriting in the tradition of a place that has always inspired that kind of devotion. "Skim Stones" and the closing "Change the Sheets" suggest an artist comfortable with endings that don't resolve so much as subside — which is, of course, closer to how things actually end.

The lineage is audible throughout and worth naming: the drift and dream of Nick Drake, Elliott Smith's slightly melancholy tones, Bon Iver's delicate wisdom, the sparseness and shade of Leonard Cohen. But invoking forebears is not the same as living in their shadow. Birch draws from these wells without becoming waterlogged by them. He knows precisely which proverbial giants have provided the shoulders to stand on, and he repays that debt by looking firmly forward rather than back.

BBC Radio Scotland presenters Lynne Hoggan and Paul Bridges have been effusive in their support — "We are huge fans," Hoggan told listeners, with the directness of someone not given to overstatement — and it is not hard to understand why. Recorded in ten days on Mull with a collaborator who is also a friend, mastered at Church Road Studios, this is a record made with uncommon care and at precisely the right moment in an artist's development, not too soon and not too late.

Weight Will Unwind is messy, tender, hopeful, frustrated, romantic, and painfully human. It does not offer answers. It holds the moments up to the light, one by one, until something in the listener shifts slightly. That, in the end, is what the good ones do. File between John Martyn and Villagers, somewhere north of sentiment and south of the clouds.