She wrote it in the grip of anxiety, and it concerns the moment when holding yourself upright becomes more exhausting than letting yourself fall. Pop tends to prefer its collapses glamorous or triumphant. Franxie offers neither. She gives us a piano, a voice and a slow descent with the lights left on.

The masterstroke is the recording itself. Piano and vocal were captured together, live, and she has declined to tidy the result. The timing drifts and mistakes remain, which she cheerfully admits. That admission is the whole point, because the track breathes like a person rather than ticking like a grid. In a business where vocals are routinely nudged, tuned and quantised into embalmed perfection, leaving the flaws in feels close to civil disobedience. Building a production around a performance that won't sit still is fiddly, thankless work. By her own account it made the job harder, and the labour shows up only as ease.

Around that core she builds with admirable restraint. Layered backing vocals gather like second thoughts. Bass and electric guitar, supplied by her longtime friend Sofia, are added around the original take rather than on top of it, like polite guests who know not to stand on the host's feet. Nothing is permitted to upstage the room where the song was born. The live performance and the studio finish share a house without so much as a raised voice, which is rarer than it sounds.

What lifts "Stone" above the crowded ranks of piano-and-confession songwriters is its double vision. Franxie says the song caught the early signs of feeling trapped (emotionally, mentally, within a relationship) long before she had a word for any of it. The song knew first, and she needed a decade to catch up. That gives it an odd authority, like a diary entry read back by the person who wrote it, wincing and forgiving in equal measure. Her reading of it has changed too. Where she once heard a description of how heavy everything felt, she now hears permission not to carry it all the time. A song that ages alongside its author is a scarce thing, and it accounts for the quiet gravity here.

Those who know her recent singles, "Fucking Around" and "Nobody's Home", with their preoccupations of autonomy, dissociation and emotional shutdown, will recognise this as the older sibling who started it all. It is gentler, certainly, but no less unflinching. It also opens a larger collection due over the coming months, and if this is the foundation stone, the building promises to be worth a visit.

Her closing sentiment is the kind that turns mawkish in lesser hands: sometimes the bravest act is accepting where you are and trusting you won't stay there. Here it lands as earned rather than sermonised, because the performance has already done the persuading. "Stone" is imperfect on purpose, and that makes it convincing. It is a song about letting go by an artist who has, at long last, done exactly that.