The genesis of the track reads like the sort of accident that only happens to musicians who know exactly what they're doing. A hotel room in Portland, a laptop, a night with nothing better to do than fiddle with synths until something sparked. That's how the best songs sneak up on their makers: not commissioned, not planned, just discovered. What separates "River" from a thousand other bedroom sketches is the discipline that followed the spark. Keefe took that loose, electronic skeleton back to Woof's practice space, dressed it in acoustic drums, layered vocals over the top, and edited it with the patience of a man who understood he'd stumbled onto something worth protecting.

The result is a record that breathes in two registers at once. There's the raw pulse of the original improvisation still audible underneath — you can hear the looseness, the willingness to let a phrase run long or a rhythm stumble slightly off the grid — and then there's the studio polish laid over it, tightening the edges without sanding away the character. Too many producers mistake refinement for erasure. Keefe treats it as punctuation instead: he knows where to place the full stop and where to let a sentence breathe.

What's most striking, given this is billed as Radical Man's first outing with vocals, is how unafraid the singing sounds. Newcomers to the microphone often oversing, desperate to prove the addition was worth making. Keefe does the opposite. The vocal sits inside the mix rather than on top of it, another instrument in service of the song's current rather than a spotlight-grabbing centrepiece. It suits the title. "River" doesn't crash. It moves — steadily, insistently, finding the path of least resistance and following it with total conviction.

Drummers-turned-frontmen carry a reputation, fair or not, for rhythm without melody, muscle without nuance. Keefe dismantles that assumption within the first minute. The groove is unmistakably the work of someone who has spent thousands of hours locked into a pocket, but the melodic sensibility on top of it — the vocal phrasing, the way the acoustic kit answers the electronic elements rather than simply overpowering them — belongs to a songwriter, full stop.

This is only the project's second release, and already it feels like the sound of an artist finding the gap between spontaneity and craft and deciding to live there permanently. "River" doesn't announce itself with fireworks. It earns its keep the old-fashioned way, through repeat listens that reveal a little more of the architecture each time. Grand Junction hasn't produced a record this quietly confident in some time, and if this is what Radical Man sounds like at its second attempt, the third is worth waiting for.