Let us dispense with the lazy assumption first. This is not a sticksman's vanity project, all fills and no feeling. Liberatore's instincts as a percussionist are present, but they work in the service of the song rather than the ego. There is a patience here, a trust in space, that most debutants would pay good money to possess. The track unfolds with the unhurried confidence of someone who knows precisely how long to leave a note hanging in the air before letting it fall.

The credit for the sound is shared, and wisely so. Fernando Perdomo, that tireless Los Angeles polymath of a producer, recorded, engineered and co-produced the track at Forward Motion Studios, and his fingerprints are everywhere without ever smudging the glass. Perdomo has long had a gift for dressing a song in warm analogue textures while keeping the whole thing sounding as though it were made this morning, and here the effect is lovely: a record that seems to glow faintly from within, like a window left lit in a house you are passing late at night. Zach Ziskin's mastering gives it a polish that never tips into sterility, which is rarer than it ought to be.

Then there are the guests. Perdomo himself contributes, as does Michelle McGregor, and the interplay lifts "Parallel" from the merely well-made to something with genuine depth of field. Voices and textures seem to run alongside one another, never quite touching, always aware of each other. The title is no accident. This is a song about proximity and distance, about lives that travel in the same direction without ever converging, and the arrangement enacts the idea rather than merely describing it. That is the mark of a writer who understands his craft.

And it is the writing, finally, that lingers. Liberatore's lyrics have been called poetic by those who know him, a word critics reach for too readily, but here it earns its keep. There is a reflective, faintly nocturnal quality to the imagery, a sense of a man thinking out loud in the small hours, unafraid of ambiguity and refusing to tie a neat bow on his feelings. The melodies, meanwhile, are the sort that settle in quietly and refuse to leave, arriving unannounced on the bus home three days later.

Debut singles are usually announcements of intent. This one feels more like an arrival. Liberatore has spent his career holding other people's songs together from the back of the room. It turns out he has been quietly writing his own, and they are very good indeed.