Dove Ellis is hard to pin down. He makes straightforward chamber-pop music. But he makes it with a ferocity shaped by his background gigging at post-punk incubator Windmill, earning comparisons to fellow piano man Cameron Winter and even opening for Geese on tour. When the 22-year-old Irish songwriter stepped on stage, audiences expecting more sprechgesang were met with a balladeer closer to the poppier sides of Thom Yorke, Jeff Buckley, and Elliot Smith. As with those artists, there are still idiosyncratic moments, but Ellis is more than willing to let his music be purely beautiful—even when things get abstract, the emotional intensity comes through.

The orchestral ballads on The Bends and XO are particular touchstones, but his music can also bring to mind Rufus Wainwright or even the quieter side of Queen. When “Heaven Has No Wings” opens with an AOR-friendly piano riff, he plays it completely straight. It helps to have established professionals on his side: The trio of Florence and the Machine engineer Dani Bennett-Spragg, mixer Sophie Ellis (no relation), and Dijon’s engineer Andrew Sarlo help this sound as pristine as any record that influenced him. Ellis’ expressive and dynamic voice is the main feature in the mix, frequently pushing into the red in his loudest moments and deliberately fragile in its quieter ones. Production flourishes like the ear-scratching cello on “Pale Song” cut through, and the swooping harmonies on nearly operatic “Little Left Hope” truly soar.

It might take several listens for the words to register. As a stylistic choice, Ellis slurs his already cryptic lyrics, so the album can feel difficult to unravel. Not helping is the lack of context; there are very few Ellis interviews online, and he’s scrubbed at least one of his previous releases: “Adonis”, a 2023 debut single described as “RnB, pop, country, funk.” In the spare press materials, he described “To the Sandals” as “reflections on a failing shotgun marriage in Cancún,” a hint that these songs are meant to be interpreted as character studies with the larger context left out.

These characters frequently seek transcendence, whether through romance (the tender acoustic ballad “Away You Stride”) or music itself (“Little Left Hope” includes a proposal to start a band). If they don’t feel doomed from the start, they give up altogether: On “Pale Song,” the narrator believes their life could be written on “stone with a little chalk,” and they can’t bring themselves to go out and actually live it. “Jaundice” depicts people “born without any face” and “without any roots.” Then again, it’s also an Irish jig performed with the energy of Ellis’ Windmill compatriots like Black Country, New Road, particularly with Matthew Deakin’s tom-heavy shuffle. It plays like a celebration of anonymity.

The moments of direct storytelling feel more tantalizing considering how little we know about the writer. “Feathers, Cash” and “When You Tie Your Hair Up” are straightforward breakup songs with lovingly intimate imagery; on the former, he describes drawing dogs with the steam in a shower, and on the latter, he notices stress manifesting in his own hands: “The skin creased in our palms cuts deeper each night,” he sings. After the best of the album’s crescendos, Ellis strips everything away again, pining for a character named Annie. On “Cash,” he characterizes love with surreal irreverence, and it sounds more like an incantation, calling a partner “my one polished orb,” followed by three handclaps.

There are plenty of very good Jeff Buckley-inspired indie songwriters across the pond, like Belgian-Egyptian songwriter Tamino and Scottish musician Jacob Alon. Dove Ellis stands out among them by finding the right balance between the weirdness of his Windmill peers and a more classicist style of songwriting. It allows him to make a near-perfect pop song, “Love Is,” also the most intricate song on the record. The arrangement is so dense it might take multiple listens to know when the multitracked Ellises swap from “love is” to “love is not,” and it will certainly take more to notice the drum hits that coincide with that switch. Even the chorus sounds more liberating than it does on the page: “Love is not the antidote to all your problems,” he sings, fitting for an album where devotion causes more damage than it heals. Even at his most accessible, Ellis still keeps his distance.