The single is the work of Claudia Heinrich-Witzenthaler, who writes under the name Quintesse, and her 21-year-old son Felix, billed as Karl Josef. It is his first professional studio recording and his debut as a solo vocalist. Debuts of this kind can go badly. Family projects often curdle into vanity exercises, with a proud parent pushing a reluctant child toward a microphone. This one doesn't, and the reason is plain within the first verse: Felix can sing, and the song has been built with real care around what he does best.

That is a warm, unforced baritone, and it carries the whole record. Nothing in it is showy. He doesn't reach for the melismatic acrobatics that talent-show graduates mistake for feeling. He sings the opening lines close and low, a little weathered, like a man talking to someone he loves across a kitchen table. There's a slight roughness at the edges that a more polished singer would have sanded away, and it's precisely what makes the performance believable. Anyone who has admired the cracked candour of James Arthur, the bruised tenderness of Lewis Capaldi or the unvarnished gentleness of Passenger will recognise the lineage, though Felix never lapses into imitation. He sounds like himself, which at this stage is the best thing a young singer can manage.

Heinrich-Witzenthaler's songwriting shows the same discipline. The lyric was written for Felix's sister Victoria, who spent years pushing through setbacks, and the sentiment is conveyed without sloganeering. It speaks to anyone who has been doubted, overlooked or told their ambitions were unrealistic, and it does so by understatement. The verses admit uncertainty. The progress they describe is slow and the destination still looks distant. Only gradually does the song permit itself some confidence, and when it does, the effect is earned rather than manufactured.

Arrangement is where the record shows its craft. The build is patient. Drums and harmony arrive in measured stages, the dynamics rising like a path that tilts upward so gently you notice the view has changed before you notice the incline. By the final section the track has grown into something broad and uplifting, yet at no point does it shout over the vocalist. That restraint is rarer than it should be in contemporary pop-rock, where the temptation to front-load the drama is almost irresistible.

Two instrumental motifs give the single its personality. A guitar line, nodding to Felix's own musical upbringing, threads through the song like a recurring thought. A saxophone, drawn from his mother's background as an instrumentalist, answers it. The saxophone is a risky colour in this territory, since it can drift quickly into soft-focus nostalgia. Here it is used sparingly and with a plaintive, slightly wistful tone, a second voice in conversation with the first. The pairing makes explicit what the biography already tells us: this is a dialogue between two generations, and the music is richer for letting us hear both sides.

Production at Neptune Studio in Hamburg keeps everything honest. The vocals have space around them, and the phrasing breathes. According to the accompanying notes, the main takes were done in about an hour, and the performance has the loose-limbed confidence you'd expect from something captured while the feeling was fresh rather than assembled from a hundred patched passes. Claudia has spoken of sitting in the control room in tears while her son enjoyed himself behind the glass. It's a charming detail, and the record honours it by never feeling overworked.

What he and his mother have made is small in scale and large in sincerity. There are no live dates planned, and engineering studies remain his priority, so the singer behind it isn't chasing fame. That absence of hunger is oddly refreshing. "On My Way" is a gentle, generous record, confident enough to start quietly and trust the listener to follow it upward. I did.