The Shropshire-raised songwriter opens with the smallest of images — a boy in a classroom, pencil between finger and thumb, drawing with the unselfconscious certainty children have before the world teaches them doubt. It's a shrewd way in. Jerome doesn't announce his theme so much as let you stumble on it, the way you'd notice a stranger's confidence across a room and feel, unbidden, a little envious. "As you draw, sketch your destiny," he sings, and already the song has done something cleverer than most three-minute pop records bother with: it has made longing sound observational rather than self-pitying.

Musically, this is Jerome loosening his collar a touch. Where "Profanity" and "Any Moment Now" kept things fairly spare, "Soar" lets a synth motif needle its way under the chorus, glinting against the guitar work like sunlight through scaffolding. It's a modest production shift, but it changes the song's temperature — this is a chorus built to lift off, not merely to swell.

And lift off it does, though the cleverness lies in what happens once it's airborne. The early verses chase a fairly conventional pop fantasy: recognition, adoration, "reward will follow." Jerome sings it with just enough conviction to make you believe he believes it, which is exactly what lets the next line land so hard — "We fall short, as the callow chase the stars." It's a gorgeous piece of writing, unforgiving of the narrator without ever losing sympathy for him, and it marks the record's pivot from wanting to be seen towards wanting, simply, to make something.

That pivot arrives via one of the loveliest images on any British single this year: a murmuration of starlings wheeling above a pier, indifferent to applause, moving because moving is what they do. Jerome watches, and the ambition songs he might have written instead — the ones about charts and validation — quietly recede. By the closing lines, "I just want to soar" has become "I just have to soar," a single swapped word doing the work of an entire bridge, turning desire into compulsion, choice into vocation.

It would be easy to overpraise a song this modest in scale, but restraint is precisely the point. Jerome isn't chasing an anthem here; he's chasing clarity, and mostly he finds it. If there's a criticism to make, it's that the arrangement occasionally plays it safer than the lyric deserves — a song this preoccupied with flight might have earned one properly reckless instrumental passage, a moment where the band lets go entirely rather than glinting politely underneath him.

Coming after stints on BBC Radio 2, festival slots at Boardmasters and BST Hyde Park, and support billing for Goldfrapp, "I Just Want to Soar" feels less like a stepping stone toward a debut EP than a small, confident statement of intent in its own right. Jerome watches the starlings, and so, gladly, do we.