The obvious worry with a one-man album is the one that haunts the bedroom auteur: the solipsism, the thin sound, the sense of a man talking to himself in a very small room. Dean sidesteps it with a fistful of tunes and an evident delight in making them. Ten songs, each sounding as though it was worked out only as it was being recorded, and the sheer pleasure of that process leaks out of the speakers. The press release calls the record "basically me, as an audio file". For once the hype undersells it. It's a more flattering likeness than most of us would dare to offer.

The sound sits at the junction of post-punk angularity, indie swagger and a disco-tinged pulse that keeps the whole thing moving. Dean knows his way around a hook, and he deploys them with the confidence of a man who has seen every fashion come and go since the early nineties and decided to stop worrying about any of them. The singles, "Oh My God" and "The Long Way Home", have already done the rounds with some well-disposed blogs, and neither sticks out as a lone highlight. They sit comfortably among their siblings, which is the best thing you can say about a singles-led album.

Then there is the matter of the words. Dean has noted, with the air of a man surprised by his own subconscious, that the phrase "holding on" turns up in half the songs. It's a theme he arrived at by accident and then, to his credit, never overplays. Love, death, nostalgia and what he cheerfully calls "middle-age angst" are all present, but they arrive without the tin-eared self-pity that sinks so many records by men of a certain vintage. The mood is of someone gripping the rail while the boat rocks, rather than wailing about the weather. Hope here is no slogan. It's something earned, you suspect, the hard way.

That honesty is the album's greatest strength. We live in an age of algorithmic polish and committee-written pop, and a record this unguarded feels almost transgressive. There is craft on show, certainly: the arrangements are tidy, the production careful, the playing assured. But it's craft in the service of feeling, not a substitute for it. As one reviewer has already observed, "intelligent songcraft" and "emotional authenticity" may be unfashionable virtues, but they have a way of outlasting the fashionable ones.

It would be easy to sentimentalise the story: the lost years, the unexpected return, the songs arriving unbidden. Strip it all away, though, and what remains is a very good album by a songwriter who has plainly never lost the knack. *Holding On* is warm, sharp, and wise without ever being pompous about it. It arrives, rather splendidly, on the strength of the songs alone.

Whether there will ever be a band, with the gigs and the fights and everything, remains to be seen. On this evidence, one man is plenty.