If "Sea of Trees" announced Rumour Den's return with atmosphere and dread, and "All in This Together" turned dystopia into a mass-rally chant you could imagine several thousand fists rising to, "Chapter & Verse" is the record's exhale. Gilmore, never a lyricist to waste a word on decoration, turns his gaze inward — or rather, sideways, at a man watching his own failure as though it belonged to someone else. It's a trick worthy of the great character studies: the failed writer cataloguing his life in the third person because the first person has become too painful to inhabit. There's a lineage here running back through Ray Davies' gallery of English also-rans and up through Alex Turner's wearier character sketches — men who talked a good game and never quite wrote one.

Simms, for his part, does something rather brave: he lightens up. After three singles built from tension and restraint, "Chapter & Verse" finds Rumour Den stepping — as the band themselves have put it — not into daylight, but into the shade. The tempo lifts. The guitar work breathes. There's a jauntiness to the arrangement that could, in lesser hands, undercut the sadness of the lyric. Instead it does the opposite: the brightness of the music makes the failure at the song's centre sting all the harder, the way a joke told at a funeral can crack something open rather than seal it shut. This is, after all, a band whose entire reputation has been rebuilt this year on the principle that the music serves the story — and here the story is one of comic self-delusion curdling slowly into tragedy, so the music curdles right along with it, just a beat behind.

What's most impressive, four singles into this campaign, is the range Gilmore and Simms are quietly demonstrating without ever losing the thread that makes Rumour Den unmistakably Rumour Den. This is a pair who spent the best part of two decades running from their own gift, dabbling and disappearing, unconvinced by their own early work. That history gives "Chapter & Verse" an extra frisson: two men who know rather too well what it feels like to assume the stories will write themselves, and rather too well what it costs when they don't. There's no cynicism in the telling, though — only a kind of rueful tenderness for their subject, and by extension, perhaps, for their younger selves.

"Chapter & Verse" won't frighten the horses the way "All in This Together" did, nor will it drape itself in the widescreen gloom of "Sea of Trees." It doesn't need to. It's the most purely enjoyable thing Rumour Den have released since their relapse began, and proof that a band capable of dread is just as capable of ache. Four singles in, *Relapse* is shaping up to be one of the more quietly essential comeback stories of the year — and this is the one you'll find yourself humming on the way out of the shade and back into the dark.