The room is Blue Light Studio, where Brae has recorded album after album with producer and bassist Kaj Falch-Nielsen. The collaboration has settled into the easy shorthand of two people who no longer need to explain themselves. *Studio* is a companion to last year's *Paint*, and it keeps that record's neon-signed Vancouver nights while pushing the sound somewhere looser, warmer and more mischievous.

The central fact of the record is the Hammond organ. Brae has tracked a 1960s model through a vintage Leslie cabinet, and he describes wheeling the old speaker out as a tactile affair. You can hear it. The organ breathes and swirls and leans on the beat, and it gives every song a physical presence that no plug-in has ever managed. Against it he sets a Fender Mustang, a guitar with a bright, slightly brittle bite, and the pairing is the album's signature. The organ supplies the weather and the Mustang cuts through it.

Then comes the drummer. Steve Ferrone, whose CV runs through Tom Petty and Eric Clapton, plays on six of the seven songs, and the album rests on him. Brae first watched him during Clapton's residency at the Royal Albert Hall, and he has the good manners to sound grateful rather than starstruck. Ferrone plays with a lightness of touch that is rarer than power: the groove sits exactly where it should, and the songs have room to move around it.

The lead single, "Scratch", opens the record in a Bowie-tinted alt-rock mood. It is an odd and quirky thing, all angular guitar and off-kilter rhythm, and it announces that this will not be a museum exhibit of classic rock. "Deja Vu" follows, pairing the Hammond with a slicing guitar riff that would not embarrass the Rolling Stones in a good week. "Hig & Jig" stays in the same swaggering territory, loose-limbed and good-humoured, with a Stonesy rasp in its step. Brae never imitates his heroes so much as he borrows their posture.

The supporting players are generous. Alison Jenkins's harmonies are the album's quiet consistent pleasure, lifting choruses without ever calling attention to the lift, and Cameron Wilson's violin adds a glint of strings where a lesser record would have reached for a synthesiser. Falch-Nielsen's bass holds the whole structure steady.

The closing track is the one that will divide listeners and delight the rest. "It Ain't Perfect But It's Free" first appeared on *Paint* as a funk-rock number. Here it returns as an 80s pop dance mix, gleaming and playful, and it works as a bookend to the strangeness of "Scratch". The sequence is meant to flow from first note to last, and it does, ending on a wink rather than a bow.

*Studio* is also a reminder of what a modest budget and a clear idea can achieve. Brae's ambition is simply to make a rock and roll record that evokes the 1970s and 80s, and he does it with real instruments, good company and evident joy. Word has it that an album of 1980s-styled pop songs is due in 2027. After this, the prospect is a tempting one.