What separates this from the glut of confessional singer-songwriter fare currently clogging playlists is a refusal to wallow. Plenty of artists treat regret as an excuse for melodrama, piling on strings until the listener feels personally accused. 23 Fields instead lets the lyric do the heavy lifting, trusting the listener to fill in the silences — the unspoken Sunday phone calls, the parents quietly ageing in another postcode. The result feels less like a confession booth and more like an overheard conversation, which is precisely why it lands.

The press notes describe the song as coming "from a very real place," and for once that's not just label copy. There's a specificity here — the elderly parent, the unfulfilled promise, the creeping awareness that "soon" is a word we use to dodge "now" — that elevates the song above generic nostalgia-pop. It's the difference between writing about loss in the abstract and writing about your own mother's voicemail.

There's a weary tenderness to the delivery that suggests someone who has actually sat in that car outside their parents' house, engine running, unable to go in — rather than someone who has merely read about the feeling and decided it would make a good chorus.

This won't be filed alongside the year's great barnstormers. It isn't trying to be. It belongs instead to that quieter lineage of songs that ambush you in the car park, or three drinks into a evening you thought you had under control, reminding you that you still haven't called home. Whether "I'll See You Soon" becomes a genuine hit or simply a well-aimed gut-punch for the right listener at the right moment rather depends on how guilty your own conscience happens to be this week.

Either way: ring your mother. The song clearly thinks you should, and for once, it's hard to argue.