The subject is lust: the insistent inner voice that murmurs at 2am and will not be reasoned with. He describes it himself as "that voice of lust and desire that is impossible to ignore". He wisely treats it as a matter of atmosphere rather than confession. The production is cinematic without ever turning bombastic. The soundscapes widen like a tide going out, a guitar line is so soothing it ought to carry a health warning, and the vocal begins close to the ear before climbing, patiently and with real command, towards the rafters. It is the musical equivalent of being offered a drink by someone you know perfectly well you shouldn't accept it from, and accepting anyway.

The touchstones are easy to name. There is some of RÜFÜS DU SOL's shimmering, horizon-gazing grandeur, a measure of Lana Del Rey's velvet fatalism, and a dash of Olly Alexander's talent for making yearning sound like a matter of public urgency. Yet Horologica avoids the pastiche merchant's trap. He borrows the lighting rather than the furniture, and the room he builds is unmistakably his own.

Then comes the piano. He has said the draft was written at the keys in about 45 minutes, in a single burst of inspiration, and the song carries itself like something discovered rather than engineered. The melody has the unforced inevitability of a tune you half remember from somewhere. Elaborate production is often laid on to disguise a weak foundation, but here the foundation is sturdy, and the atmospherics are an embellishment rather than a rescue.

It would be lazy to make too much of his day job, so let us make exactly the right amount of it. By trade Horologica repairs and restores antique clocks, and his songs keep the habits of that craft: nothing loose, nothing wasted, every layer meshing with its neighbour like the wheels of a well-regulated movement. The irony is delicious. A man who spends his days coaxing time into behaving has written a song about the moment when time stops behaving, when desire suspends judgment and the hours smear into one long, humming trance.

Best of all is the song's refusal to moralise. The Odyssey-inspired framing might have invited a cautionary tale, with the sailor bound, the crew deafened and virtue triumphant. Instead the song leans towards the rocks, allowing beauty and danger to coexist without resolving the argument. That ambivalence gives it a slow-burning charge, and the sense that the listener is being drawn somewhere they may not wish to leave.

A more suspicious critic might ask for a longer spell of it, or a bolder swerve somewhere in the arrangement. But this is the quibble of someone who was enjoying himself enough to want more. Siren Lullaby is best heard through headphones in the dark, where its widescreen textures have room to bloom, though the intensity promised on stage is an enticing prospect too.

Horologica has spent a growing catalogue of emotional pop songs working towards a sound this assured. Here it arrives: elegant, immersive and slyly dangerous. Turn it up, and let the tide take you.