George's answer arrives in the form of a song that understands the difference between volume and weight. The verses are hushed and melancholic, sung with the caution of a man walking through a house where someone else's furniture still stands. Then the chorus detonates. That quiet-loud seesaw has been grunge's inheritance since the Pixies, but George handles it with the assurance of someone who has studied the blueprints. You can hear the Seattle lineage in the rasp and the refusal to sand off the rough edges: a little Cornell in the throat, a little Vedder in the chest. Above it all, Jeff Buckley's influence lifts the melody into the rafters, and those upper reaches give the wreckage a strange grace.

Jonah Brockman, who produced and mixed the track, deserves a share of the credit. The recording moved between George's home studio and Brockman's own, and the sound carries that domestic intimacy. Nothing here feels rented by the hour. Guitars gather like weather over the verses, the space between the instruments is left open to brood, and there is a Radiohead-ish patience in how the arrangement withholds its release. When the whole band finally breaks wide, it feels earned rather than merely scheduled. Brockman has polished the song without laundering it, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than it should be.

Beneath the atmospherics sits a proper song, and that matters more than any amount of reverb. George cites The Beatles as a teacher, and the lesson has stuck: the tune stays at the centre of the frame while everything else swirls around it. It is a melody you could hum on the night bus, which is exactly where songs about loss tend to do their best work. The lyric, meanwhile, refuses the easy consolation. The wish to wipe the slate clean is felt keenly, but so is the dawning suspicion that those shared memories, even the ones that sting, are part of what makes you you. That tension between wanting to forget and being unable to give up what you had gives the song its ache.

The accompanying video understands that a song this direct needs no fireworks. Its business is to give the ache a face and leave the emotional heavy lifting to the music. It does so without upstaging the tune, which is more discipline than many bigger-budget promos can manage.

Alt-rock has no shortage of men shouting about their feelings. Far fewer can make a chorus break your heart and then hand you the tissue. George, on the evidence of this single, is among them. *Out of Line* now looks like an album worth waiting for.