Bash Co. has been writing and recording solo since 1999, which means "Velvet" arrives after more than a quarter of a century of patient, unglamorous work. His Spotify profile reads "Teacher. Songwriter. Not a singer." That is a disclaimer worthy of Morrissey's quieter moments, and I suspect it is a smokescreen. Whatever he thinks of his own voice, he has written a song that does not hide behind one.

The story behind it is irresistible. Six days in Prague, a notebook, and a tune that apparently arrived whole, in a man who normally spends weeks wrestling a song into shape. Anyone who has ever laboured over a middle eight will envy him. The result has the breathless, slightly dazed quality of a postcard written on the train before the feeling fades, and it is all the better for it. Haste is a vice in most arrangements, but here it reads as sincerity.

The subject is love under strain. It is a love song about affection that endures when circumstances turn rough, and Bash Co. has the good sense to hang it on the city's own history. Kafka drifts through the lyric, as he must in Prague, alongside the monuments, the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the long shadow of the Iron Curtain. Lesser writers would have turned this into a history lecture. Here the political and the personal run on the same track, and the parallel is the whole point: a city that outlasted its oppressors makes a fine metaphor for a couple outlasting their bad years.

Then come the drums. In the song's second half, Bash Co. wanted the percussion to suggest troops on the march, and by his own admission he fought to get it right. The effort shows, and it pays off. This is the sort of detail that separates a song with ideas from a song with merely good intentions. The listener may never know why the rhythm tightens and takes on that martial tread, though the artist cheerfully admits as much himself. Still, the effect lands on the nerves, as the best production touches do. Love in this song does not simply sit and glow. It drills, it holds its line, and it keeps going.

Recorded in his own home studio, "Velvet" carries the stubborn dignity of homemade music made by someone who cares more about the work than the reception. There is no label gloss and no marketing department, only a man, a room and an obsession. That is how many of the finest records in British and European pop began, and it is a pleasure to hear the tradition alive and well on the Portuguese coast.

Bash Co. quotes Kafka's line that we are all cages in search of a bird, and argues that a cage without a bird has no purpose. Seen that way, "Velvet" is the bird at last, let out of a quarter-century of cupboards and drawers. Released on the artist's birthday, it feels less like a product than a gift, to himself and to whoever is lucky enough to find it.

Hear it, and then ask him for the next one. He has had more than twenty-five years of songs waiting.