The ingredients are announced plainly. They are the sleek, rolling swing of Artful Dodger, the honeyed R&B ache of Craig David, and a reverse warp kick borrowed from the nervous system of Don Toliver's "E85". On paper that reads like a fantasy-league draft, three heroes of three decades assembled to see who plays nicely. In practice it sounds less like homage than like a man wearing three borrowed jackets and somehow making them fit. The rhythm section keeps one foot on the dancefloor you remember, while the warped kick keeps tugging the floor out from under you. You know where the beat should land, and it lands a fraction somewhere else. That is the song's entire argument about identity, delivered through percussion.

Then come the vocals, and this is where "Alter Ego" stops being clever and becomes devastating. Roger K stacks his voice into layers that don't so much harmonise as accumulate, one self on top of another, until the chorus has the density of a crowded room in which every person is the same person. One early listener described it as falling into a void, and that is exactly right. Each layer seems to be holding the others up, and the sound is lovely and faintly alarming at once. It's the aural equivalent of catching your reflection in a shop window and not being sure which one of you walked past first.

Lyrically, the premise is humane and sharply observed. Someone looks at him and, unforgivably, sees him, and the song follows the panic that results: the armour loosening, the frantic fumbling to put the face back on before too much has been revealed. The smartest decision is that the record never resolves this. It doesn't dramatise the unmasking or sneer at the mask. It sits in the awkward half-second between the two, which is where most of us actually live. The performance is wounded without being theatrical, confident without protesting too much, and at no point does it ask for sympathy it hasn't earned.

Fifteen years as a live frontman shows in the delivery. This is a singer who knows how to hold a room and, more unusually, how to let it see him wobble. Across melodic house, R&B, Afrobeats and reggae he has refused to stay in one lane, and "Alter Ego" feels like the record where all those lanes finally meet at a junction and the traffic is beautiful.

Play it loud, and watch which version of yourself dances.