Twenty-two albums in, a songwriter either repeats himself into oblivion or finds a way to make repetition itself the joke. Hersey has chosen the latter path, and *Quixote* is the sound of a man who has finally admitted that the windmill was never going to fall, and decided to enjoy the tilting anyway.

Raymond Chandler lent the title, from *The Big Sleep*, a line delivered with the sly relish of a man who knows exactly what the neighbourhood is going to cost him. Ryan Yingst, a folk singer from Hershey, Pennsylvania by way of a Pittsburgh jazz-guitar degree, a Nashville apprenticeship and, since late 2023, Philadelphia's gig circuit, has taken the joke and built six songs inside it. They are honest, handsome and quietly ruinous, and they are the finest thing he has put his name to.

Two decades and six years is a peculiar gestation period for a pop song, longer than most marriages, longer than most careers. And yet C'batch's new EP wears its slow-cooked origins not as a burden but as a badge, the way a good stew tastes better for having sat on the hob since roughly the turn of the millennium.

Vulnerability, on record, usually arrives pre-packaged: a stripped-back arrangement, a whispered vocal, the implicit stage direction reading *sincerity now*. Freidrich$ has spent a career resisting that packaging, burying his voice under distortion and studio trickery as if flinching from his own confessions. Doll, Here I Am is the record where the flinching stops.