The format is an eccentric one. In an age of surprise drops and algorithmic impatience, releasing a double album in four slices, each on the 25th of the month, is either an act of faith in the listener or a rather splendid piece of stubbornness. Either way, it works in his favour. Where a 24-track sprawl can exhaust, a side at a time invites you to live with a record, which suits songs that ask you to sit, think and look at your own life a little harder than is comfortable.

That is the project's real subject. Jeremy does not simply present feelings; he interrogates them, examining the distance between what people are promised and what they ultimately receive, the difficulty of authentic connection, and the courage required to change. It is a confessional sensibility, but a disciplined one, more interested in cross-examination than catharsis. *Side Two* travels through pain, grief, joy and fear, and does so, remarkably, from the vantage of someone who seems to have had a fulfilled life rather than a ruined one. That is a rarer and braver stance than the usual wound-licking. Gratitude is much harder to write than misery, and it is easy to come across as smug. Jeremy largely avoids that trap.

The album's two standout tracks, "Do Birds Sing the News" and "Idonella Sakaiensis", show the appetite for oblique titles that marks a writer who trusts his audience. The second borrows the name of the bacterium discovered to digest plastic, which is about as far from a conventional love-song title as one could wish, and it promises a writer willing to look sideways at the world rather than straight down the barrel of his own navel. Together they pair carefully built music with lyrics that make the listener stop mid-task and consider how we live. That is an old ambition in songwriting, and a difficult one to pull off.

Then there is the matter of the machinery. Jeremy writes every note and word himself, often on an old Faith acoustic in the garden, and uses AI tools as what he calls a "prosthetic" to build the band he couldn't assemble: the vocals and drums, filled out after a planned collaboration failed to materialise. Purists will bristle, and the question deserves debate. But the tradition of the bedroom auteur is a tradition of making do: Nilsson with his multitracked voice, Prince with his one-man funk, every four-track dreamer with a cassette and a grudge. Technology here is a means of getting the songs out of the drawer, and the songs remain stubbornly, essentially human. If there is a thesis to *Side Two*, it is that the feeling is in the writing, not the tools.

*Side Two* is a warm, wry, thoughtful record from a writer with something to say and the patience to say it properly. Sides Three and Four, due on 25 October and 25 November, now look like appointments worth keeping.