The opening line is a gauntlet: "Just look around you, satellites keep falling from the sky." Delivered flat and unhurried, it has the weary authority of a man who has watched the news so you needn't, and who has concluded that somebody ought to say something. The couplet that follows, about running out of time, lands with none of the preening that usually afflicts protest music. Nobody here is auditioning for sainthood. He just sounds tired of the carnage, and being tired is a more credible position than being angry.

The architecture matches the sentiment. Drum, bass and guitar samples give the track its spine, a sturdy, unfussy rhythm section that never demands a round of applause. Over the top, strings swell and curl, lending the whole thing a melancholy grandeur that would sit comfortably alongside the better moments of late-sixties baroque psychedelia. This is a one-man band with the ambitions of an orchestra and the budget of a bus fare, and the gap between the two is where the charm lives. Nothing sounds over-polished. Everything sounds meant.

His catalogue offers a clue to the pedigree. "Biba Love," "Hippie Girl" and "Scandinavian Girls" suggest a man steeped in the velvet-and-incense end of the sixties, and that heritage hums beneath this single like a pilot light. What he has done is take the old psychedelic vocabulary of wonder and wooziness and point it squarely at wars, famine and inequality. Flower power with a conscience and a grudge is a rare animal, and the old hippies, who preached peace and then went shopping, might blush at it.

Then comes the video, which deserves its own paragraph. Our man spent long hours gathering footage and, wearing earbuds, matched his vocals to faces by hand. It is the sort of laborious, obsessive craft that no algorithm can fake, and it shows in the sync, which has a handmade tenderness. Lip and lyric knit together, and a song about the collective madness of humanity acquires a gallery of individual human faces. The effect is oddly moving. Slick it is not, and thank heaven for that.

Then there is the title phrase itself, the warning that we risk becoming "the masters of our own destruction." Lesser writers would have shouted it. Electrobuddha lets it hang in the air like smoke and trusts the listener to supply the shiver. That restraint is the mark of a songwriter confident in his material, and it makes the record feel less like a lecture than a conversation overheard in the best pub in Scotland.

Semi-retired, he says, down to lack of interest. The world's indifference is its own indictment. A record this honest, this carefully built and this plainly necessary ought to be doing more than quietly sitting on a streaming platform. Pop's great outsiders have always worked from spare rooms and borrowed gear, and the best of them have always been ignored first and canonised later.

Turn it up. Then go and explore the back catalogue, because Electrobuddha Towers clearly has a few more floors.