The opening line of the title track sets the terms: "if I'm honest, I'm never honest." It is a lyric of such brutal economy that it practically arrives with its own coat on, ready to leave. Crowley sings it from the upper reaches of his register, tender and slightly stretched, over a soft guitar figure and a thicket of close harmonies that wrap around him like a heavy winter scarf. Piano drifts in, swells, and retreats back to the plucked strings. The music is lovely, almost disarmingly so, and that is the trick. The prettiness makes the lyric hit harder, like a bruise discovered under a clean shirt.
The EP's real subject is inheritance: the marks left by family, by old lovers who were bad for him, and by a culture that has never quite known where to put queer men who refuse to fit the template. Crowley handles this without a trace of sermonising. He is after understanding, even kindness toward his own defensive habits, which makes for a more adult kind of songwriting than the self-flagellation the genre often settles for. Laura Marling and Big Thief are the obvious neighbours, and he stands comfortably beside them. His melodic instincts, though, belong to him alone.
The company he keeps helps. Joel Amey, the drummer of Wolf Alice, brings a kinetic, forward-leaning pulse that keeps these songs from sinking into their own sensitivity. Mike Horner, whose CV runs from Franz Ferdinand to Deaf Havana and who clearly doesn't believe in genre fences, produces with a lovely sense of proportion. He knows when to let a chorus swell towards indie-rock urgency and when to pull everything back so a single voice can breathe. The result is Crowley's biggest-sounding work to date, yet it never feels like a man shouting to prove he can. The widescreen moments have earned their room.
The two earlier singles hold their places in the sequence with confidence. "Co-Pilot" opens the record with a spring in its step, and "I Wish I Could Just Do Something" carries a restless, wry ache that anyone who has ever stared at a ceiling at 3am will recognise. Together they give the EP a shape: curiosity, then confession, then a slow turn toward decision. Closer "(Am I) Strong Enough" poses its question with its brackets on, hedging even as it asks, which seems exactly right for a record so alert to the ways we flinch from our own feelings.
What lingers is the EP's moral spine. Crowley does not pretend that we escape what shaped us. He suggests instead that the mess can be named, forgiven a little, and then walked away from. "Finding the courage to choose differently" is the line he offers as a summary, and the music backs him up with warmth, nerve and a few genuinely lovely melodies.
*Imprint* is a quiet record that makes a great deal of noise in the chest. Crowley has found his lane, and it turns out to be wide enough for the whole messy business of being human. On 14 October at The Victoria, we find out how it sounds in a room.