What separates this from the standard indie-folk confession is the collision at its heart: delicate, questioning lyricism thrown against synth textures that feel simultaneously alien and instantly recognisable. Producer Mike Horner, whose CV includes Franz Ferdinand and Hot Wax, gives the track a sheen without sanding down its rougher instincts. You can hear the seams where folk intimacy meets pop ambition, and Crowley wisely lets those seams show rather than smoothing them into something more market-friendly.
Co-written with Wolf Alice's Joel Amey, the song thrives on a push and pull that never quite resolves — vulnerability straining against self-protection, one hand reaching out while the other stays braced near the door. That tension is the engine of the whole piece. Crowley doesn't sing like a man who has already worked out how the story ends; he sings like someone mid-freefall, still deciding whether to trust the person catching him. It's a canny bit of writing, because most songs about new love pretend to certainty they haven't earned. This one admits, almost sheepishly, that it doesn't know what it's allowed to ask for yet.
Vocally, Crowley leans on the unfurling harmonies that have become something of a signature, stacking them not for grandeur but for intimacy, as though he's talking himself into courage one layer at a time. The chorus doesn't explode so much as tip over, gravity doing the work that a bigger hook might have done for a lesser songwriter. It's a smart restraint, and it pays off: the song earns its intensity rather than announcing it.
Set alongside the rest of the forthcoming EP Imprint, "Co-Pilot" reads as a deliberate opening gambit — restless, a little reckless, the sound of someone stepping into a night out without knowing quite how it will end. Crowley has spoken of following that recklessness toward something quieter and harder-won across the record, and on the strength of this single, that arc feels earned rather than merely promised.
He sits in interesting company — Laura Marling's precision, Big Thief's unguarded strangeness, Bombay Bicycle Club's melodic instinct — but "Co-Pilot" doesn't sound like tribute. It sounds like a songwriter working out his own vocabulary for desire, one that makes room for a queer, London-bred vulnerability the genre has too often smoothed over or ignored. Given the calibre of his collaborators and the confidence on display here, Imprint looks set to be one of the more quietly compelling folk-pop records of the year. On this evidence, Crowley isn't just riding shotgun on his own songs anymore — he's flying them.