The architecture is gloriously modest: six chords, learned during a Master's degree, and a voice. Lesser writers would have hidden behind complication. Sankaran does the braver thing and lets the simplicity breathe, trusting that a good chord sequence, like a good friend, doesn't need to shout to be heard. The result sits comfortably in the same room as José González's hushed fingerpicking and Jeff Buckley's cathedral-sized vulnerability, with a flicker of early Radiohead's bruised romanticism and Norah Jones's late-night warmth. Those are heavy names to invoke, yet the song carries them without strain.

Then comes the subject. The lyrics, written by her longtime friend Rohan Tharyan, begin in the bedroom-ceiling cosmos of childhood, all dragons and mermaids, and walk slowly towards the fluorescent reality of jobs, relationships, family and wedding rings. It is a journey every listener over a certain age has made, usually without noticing the exact moment the fairytale ended. Tharyan's words refuse the cheap trick of sneering at either side of that divide. The dragons are not foolish and the wedding rings are not a punishment. What the song captures, with unnerving gentleness, is the quiet collision between the person we meant to become and the one who turned up to work on Monday. Growing up, it suggests, is something we do, not something we necessarily get good at.

Sankaran sings it with the unhurried clarity of someone who has spent years studying how people behave under uncertainty and has made a private peace with the results. Her delivery is plain-spoken but never flat, and the emotional weight arrives through restraint rather than volume. She sounds like a person confiding rather than performing, which is the most difficult register in all of singing and the one that lasts longest.

The production deserves its own round of applause. Sanjai Shine's guitar and backing vocals add colour and lift without crowding the song's fragile centre, while Mervin Thomas's mix and master give the whole thing a warm, close-miked intimacy. Crucially, nothing here polishes away the humanity. It sounds like a song that has been looked after rather than renovated, the sonic equivalent of a beloved coat finally taken to a good tailor. The missing stanza feels oddly fitting for a song about the things time quietly takes from us.

Her own verdict, that leaving it twenty years was either very on theme or spectacularly bad admin, shows a sense of humour that keeps the song's ache from tipping into self-pity. It is the wry smile behind the sigh, and it is what makes the whole thing so likeable.

This is Tarita's fourth solo release, and it marks her out as an artist whose eclecticism feels like curiosity rather than indecision. "The Death of Peter Pan" is small in scale, enormous in feeling, and unfashionably sincere. Play it once on a quiet evening and you will likely find yourself playing it again, thinking about dragons, and wondering where you left yours.

**Verdict: A beautiful, rueful gem, well worth the wait.**