There's a particular kind of record that refuses to announce itself, and "Missed Connection," the new single from Long Island songwriter Mark Cee, belongs squarely to that lineage — the hushed, unshowy tradition running from Nick Drake's bedsit reveries through to Bon Iver's cabin confessionals. It is not a song that grabs you by the lapels. It is a song that waits for you to lean in, and then, once you have, refuses to let go.

Cee, recording alone in his home studio in Babylon, New York, has built something that sounds almost accidental in its intimacy — as though you've wandered into a kitchen at two in the morning and caught someone thinking out loud. The production is spartan to the point of austerity: acoustic guitar, voice, the odd hum left in rather than scrubbed out, the tape hiss of a man who trusts the room more than the mixing desk. This is a deliberate provocation in an industry addicted to gloss, and it pays off handsomely. Where a lesser artist might have reached for strings to signal Importance, Cee reaches for silence instead, and silence, deployed correctly, is the most expensive instrument going.

Vocally, he sits in that cracked, unpolished register that comparisons to early Dylan and Elliott Smith tend to gesture toward without quite explaining — the sense of a voice that has decided honesty matters more than technique. He doesn't so much sing the melody as worry at it, circling phrases the way a person circles a memory they haven't fully processed. The songwriting itself favours understatement over confession; nothing here is spelled out, and that restraint is precisely the point. Grief, longing, the ache of a connection that never quite closed the distance — these are implied rather than declared, left for the listener to fill in with whatever loss they happen to be carrying themselves.

The arrangement never swells into anything resembling a chorus in the conventional sense, which will frustrate anyone expecting a hook to hang their hat on. But that absence of release is the song's cleverest trick. It mirrors its own subject matter: a missed connection doesn't resolve, doesn't crescendo, doesn't tie itself up in a satisfying bow. It just lingers, unfinished, the way these things do in life. Cee understands this instinctively, and he has the nerve — rare in a young artist eager to prove himself — to let a song stay small when a smaller song is the truer one.

Following on from "How You Left Me Still," this single confirms rather than merely repeats: the debut wasn't a fluke of algorithmic luck but the sound of a genuine sensibility finding its feet. Cee draws from Sufjan Stevens' hushed narrative instinct and Iron & Wine's warm, unhurried phrasing without ever sounding like a pastiche of either — the reference points are audible, but the voice underneath them is unmistakably his own.

Ahead of the forthcoming EP, "Missed Connection" functions less as a statement of ambition than as a quiet act of trust — trust that a listener will sit with two and a half minutes of near-nothing and find it adds up to something considerable. Cee is betting that patience still has an audience. On this evidence, he's right to. Late-night listening doesn't get more deserving than this.