Cameron Roberts writes like someone keeping a diary they're slightly embarrassed by, which is precisely why it lands. The lyrics on opener "If You Want Me" wobble between tenderness and dread without ever curdling into either, and Roberts sings them in a voice that cracks at the edges rather than performing a crack for effect. Guitarist Luca Moneti Schliemann is the record's secret weapon: his phrasing owes as much to smoky, after-hours jazz guitar as it does to the blues-rock lineage the band claims, and he seems constitutionally incapable of playing the obvious note when a stranger, more interesting one is sitting right there waiting. By the time "Blue Eyes, Sunshine" arrives with its loose, late-spring shuffle, the band's chemistry is already established fact rather than promise.

The rhythm section deserves its own paragraph, and here it is. Jasper Grigsby-Schulte's bass doesn't merely hold the bottom end together; it argues with it, walking against Joe Bailey's rhythm guitar like two people who love each other and disagree about everything. That tension gives the record its pulse. Where a lesser folk-rock outfit would iron out the wrinkles in post-production, Saur has wisely left them showing. You can hear the room. You can hear four people deciding, in real time, whether a song is about to fall apart or come together, and choosing togetherness by the skin of their teeth.

Thematically, the album chews on love, anxiety, and the particular vertigo of watching your life change shape without your permission — hardly virgin territory, but Honey VHS approach it sideways rather than head-on. "Jet Lag" is ostensibly about the exhaustion of feeling judged by the people closest to you, yet it never announces its subject outright, letting the ache seep in through mood and texture rather than the chorus. "Never Left The Ground" pulls the same trick from another angle, all held breath and hesitation. It's a neat device, and the band deploy it more than once without it growing tired.

The instrumental "Cotten Rag" earns its place as more than a palate cleanser — two minutes of unhurried, plucked acoustic guitar that functions as the record's exhale before "November" and "Childhood" tip the album into its more mournful back half. If the record has a fault, it's a slight sag around this stretch, where the live-take philosophy occasionally mistakes looseness for momentum and a song or two drifts rather than builds. But even the drift has character; this isn't filler so much as a band pausing for breath between exertions.

By the closing "Secrets Are For Losers," a slow, weeping waltz that lets Roberts' voice fray at last, the picture is complete: a young group with genuine chemistry, a producer smart enough to stay out of their way, and a songwriter finding his nerve in real time. *With Pulp* won't reinvent folk-rock, and it doesn't try to. What it offers instead is the far rarer thing — a debut that sounds lived-in rather than rehearsed, warm rather than polished, and entirely unbothered by trend. Keep an ear on this lot. The room they recorded in sounds like a good place to be.