Crystal Palace's answer to the parched Americana balladeer has always had an ear for the unglamorous corners of feeling, but here his songcraft tightens into something genuinely unsettling. The acoustic guitar work is patient almost to a fault, circling rather than announcing, the sort of playing that trusts silence as much as sound. It's a canny decision, because it leaves room for Niilo Sirola's banjo and Irish bouzouki to do the emotional heavy lifting, and heavy lifting it is. Sirola doesn't decorate this song so much as haunt it — his lines slip in at the edges like smoke under a door, all tremor and unease, Celtic filigree bent toward something closer to dread.

Garside's vocal, meanwhile, refuses the easy route of righteous outrage. He sings the narrator not as villain but as a man cornered by his own smallness, jealous of an entity he cannot compete with, and the restraint pays off handsomely. Where a lesser songwriter might've reached for melodrama or moralising, Garside opts for empathy laced with horror, letting the listener sit uncomfortably close to a man mid-collapse. It recalls, at points, the narrative sleight of hand Ray Davies once specialised in — those small English tragedies rendered with tenderness rather than judgment — and the comparison to The Kinks reimagined as a roots outfit, offered by a friend of the artist, turns out to be rather more precise than press-release flattery usually allows.

Recorded at RMS Studios in Selhurst Park, the production carries a warmth that never tips into cosiness; there's grit under the fingernails of this recording, a rawness that suits the subject matter. Nothing here sounds varnished for radio, and the song is all the more compelling for it. The interplay between Garside and Sirola feels less like session work and more like conversation — two musicians listening hard to one another, each pulling the other toward stranger, richer territory than either might have found alone.

What lingers longest isn't the shock of the source story but the tenderness Garside extends to it. Jealousy, faith, obsession — these are unwieldy themes, prone to cliché, yet he navigates them with a novelist's patience and a folk musician's economy. "That There Is Our Problem" doesn't shout its ambitions. It simply sits with its subject, unflinching, until the discomfort becomes its own kind of beauty. Few singles this year have made quite so much of quite so little — a guitar, a banjo, a bouzouki, and one man's very bad Sunday — and fewer still have done it with this much grace.

A genuinely arresting piece of storytelling folk, and proof that Garside's narrative instincts are sharpening with every release.