Polish has become so routine that its absence now shocks. Jephasun has no use for it. His producers apparently consisted of a room, a few hours and a refusal to flinch. The keys are the spine of the thing, and you can feel the weight of each finger arriving. They are struck like a man testing ice. Some notes hold, some wobble, and the wobbling is the music. Pianos in pop are usually dressed up for church or cabaret, but here the instrument sounds like furniture in a house where something happened.

The voice is where the record lands its blows. Jephasun doesn't sing so much as confess in a low, cracked register. It sits somewhere between a late-night radio drifter and a preacher who has lost the faith but kept the sermon. He never oversells. Where a lesser performer would reach for a big finish, he lets a line sag and crumble, and the effect is more devastating than any crescendo. The songs have the dark edges of a man who has seen the lights go down on a great many rooms and stayed to sweep up.

That history matters. Raised deep in the Australian bush with one television channel and no internet, Jephasun arrived in Sydney's inner-city scene in the 1980s and never left it in spirit, though Perth is home now. He has fronted The Polite Society and played keys for The Beautiful Losers, which means he has spent most of his life serving other people's songs, standing at the edge of the stage in other people's shadows. *In The End* is what comes out when a lifetime of sideman discipline is finally pointed inward. The patience, the economy and the instinct for where a song wants to breathe are all audible. Nobody here is showing off. Everyone is listening, and the one person listening hardest is the man at the keys.

He is also a painter, and you can hear it. The songs have the same heavy lines and bold, slightly bruised colour as expressionist canvases, with something lurking beneath the surface that never quite shows its face. Each track works like a stroke laid down once and left alone. Nothing is retouched and nothing is hidden. A weaker artist would go back and tidy up. Jephasun leaves the drips where they fell, and they turn out to be the best part.

At four tracks the EP is lean to the point of austerity, and that is its great virtue. Nothing is padded and nothing outstays its welcome. The record finishes before you are ready, which is the surest sign that the songs are doing their job. You will want to play it again immediately, partly to catch what slipped past you and partly because the room it conjures is a strange, rough, oddly comforting place to stand.

It would be easy to file this under outsider art and move on. That label undersells the craftsmanship. These are exactingly built songs that happen to sound unvarnished, and the discipline behind the ruggedness is what separates a real record from a mere mood. Jephasun knows precisely how much to leave out.

*In The End* is a small, black-hearted triumph, and one of the most quietly commanding releases of the year. Hurb Jephasun spent a career in the background, and he is now very much in the foreground.