Consider the narrator. He stares, looks away, stares again. He loses his composure in the manner of a man whose dignity has quietly left the room without telling him. He rehearses a conversation that will never happen, and we are invited to watch him do it: the dry mouth, the improvised opening lines, the small private catastrophes. Pop has spent decades pretending that feeling something and doing something are the same act. Aurealis knows better, and the song lives in the gap between them. The boundary is clearly marked and he knows precisely where it sits. Everything simply goes on happening inside his head anyway.

That head is where the song's most inspired device lives. The repeated "mind, mind, mind" is a hook in the purest sense, catchy enough to lodge itself behind your eyes for a week. It is also a confession. A fixation that would ordinarily stay sealed in the skull is turned into the most singable part of the record, so the listener ends up chanting the narrator's secret along with him. It is faintly mischievous. The shame becomes the sing-along.

Then comes the refrain, "You're absolutely exquisite," delivered with the euphoria of a man who has stopped arguing with himself for exactly four bars. The song has been building pressure toward it, and the release arrives as glittering relief rather than triumph. The synths shimmer with a chrome-plated confidence that the narrator himself lacks, and the contrast is the point. The production makes the feeling look magnificent while the lyric admits how undignified it is to have it.

Aurealis, a solo independent songwriter, writes with a rare lack of sanctimony. The song never moralises, and it never treats the flutter of attraction as a licence to misbehave or as a sin to be atoned for. It regards the feeling as an involuntary weather event, something that simply happens to a person who is otherwise committed to the life he has. That is a grown-up idea, and pop is seldom grown-up about anything. The awkwardness is left in rather than polished out, and the record is better for it.

What remains is a single of real poise: a hook that sticks, a conceit that holds, and a central emotion, the ache of wanting nothing to come of it, that most songwriters would not know how to approach. "Exquisite" is an apt title, and Aurealis has earned it.