Anyone who met Fierce Friend through the first two singles from *Blood Red Hills & The Uncanny Valley*, the title track and "Put You Right", will have filed him under alternative rock. "Tokyo Rose" quietly tears up that filing card. It opens with almost nothing: a few interlocking piano figures and an intimate, close-miked vocal, unhurried and slightly wary, like someone testing the ice on a frozen pond. Ben Folds is the obvious reference for the songwriterly warmth, but the architecture is pure Steve Reich. Small patterns loop, drift out of phase and begin to collide, and the effect is strangely moving. Repetition here doesn't offer comfort. It builds tension, which suits a story about signals that may or may not mean anything.

That is the song's great trick. Each new layer arrives so softly that you never notice the moment you stopped listening to a ballad. Drums creep in, then guitar, then cello and harp, the last two lending a sorrowful, silvery grandeur that never tips into melodrama. The rhythms stack into a polyrhythmic swell, and the sensation of being pulled under by the ocean, which could easily have stayed a lyrical conceit, becomes something you feel in the chest. Headphones are strongly advised. The pleasure lies in hearing how each part leans on the next.

Then the four-to-the-floor pulse arrives and the whole thing tilts. Grice builds an electronic plateau that sounds deliberately unsteady, like a nightclub heard through several walls just as the roof gives way. It is a bold, faintly absurd image, and the track delivers it with a straight face. Thom Yorke is the name that comes to mind, and Jon Hopkins too, in the way acoustic tenderness and electronic unease bleed into each other. A trace of Sufjan Stevens lingers in the patient, hymn-like accumulation. Yet Fierce Friend reaches this territory by a more homespun route. The plain piano and the human voice never vanish under the machinery, and that stubborn persistence gives the chaos its emotional weight.

Grice also has the good sense not to solve the mystery. Searchlights sweep, radio crackles, phantom transmissions surface and fade. Did she sink quietly beneath the waves, or rise into the night sky? The song leaves both fates hanging, and its final stretch, dense, hypnotic and thoroughly uncanny, makes either seem plausible. That refusal to resolve fits an artist whose songs routinely twist through unexpected chords and open out into extended endings of texture and atmosphere. At 3:49 it is remarkably economical for something this ambitious, a whole voyage in the time it takes to boil an egg.

Grice has form, of course. Years spent in Brighton's indie and art-pop scene, with Electric Soft Parade, Foxes! and Octopuses among his credits, show in the craft: the arrangement is patient, the dynamics carefully managed, and the melody never gets lost in the cleverness. His 2018 debut, *Lies That Comfort You*, earned airplay on 6 Music and Stuart Maconie's description of "a great sophistipop record". "Tokyo Rose" carries that emotional intelligence into harsher, stranger territory, and should find a welcome among listeners who like their pop with an odd pulse.

A single rarely changes your mind about an artist in barely three minutes, and rarer still is one that leaves you wanting the album at once. "Tokyo Rose" is haunted, inventive and quietly thrilling. Find a good pair of headphones and let it carry you out to sea.