The set-up is a fading relationship at the point where doubt tips into clarity, and the music behaves accordingly. The verses are spacious and reflective, deliberately underfilled, like a flat after someone has taken their records. Expressive female vocals sit at the centre, close enough that you hear the hesitation in them. Beneath them a steady house pulse ticks like a heart that hasn't decided how to feel. Bright melodic plucks glint over the top, small points of light in a room where the curtains are still drawn.

Then the transitions begin to rise, and the record does what the best melodic house does: it makes a build feel like a decision rather than a device. Lesser producers pile on tension for its own sake. AVRION lets each swell carry narrative weight, so when the chorus arrives, fuller and more open, it lands as relief rather than mere volume. The move from reflection to release is the whole song, handled with a composure that belies a project still early in its life. "Free" is the right title, and the chorus earns it.

The artist's own biography promises atmospheric production, emotional songwriting and cinematic builds, and it is rare for a blurb to be so accurate. The cinema extends to the sleeve: a lone figure on a wide plain at dusk, pink sky bleeding into teal, angular architecture looming like a stranded spacecraft. It is a fair picture of the song's emotional geography. A small person faces a large horizon, with no obvious map and no wish to go back.

Not the least of the record's virtues is its refusal to choose between rooms. It has evidently been made with two listeners in mind: the one alone in a living room with the lights low, and the one under strobes with a stranger's arm around their shoulder. It serves both. The dance energy never crowds out the feeling, because the pulse keeps you moving while the melody keeps you honest. Melodic progressive house has a reputation for sentiment applied like icing, but here the sentiment is in the batter.

As the follow-up to debut single *Even Though*, "Free" gives the project a clear identity: vocal-led, luminous and unembarrassed about feeling things on a dance floor. Its title could double as a mission statement, and the promise of more releases to come reads less like marketing than a fair warning.

It is a bright, well-judged piece of work, and it leaves you wanting to hear what comes next. Keep the window open.