Image credit: Jono White

Weeks away from releasing his debut album, Dermot Henry is already a fully-formed songwriter, with a perfectly tender set of earthy folk-rock singalongs and beautifully sung tear-jerkers. Surely much grander stages await.

Briefly, you could be forgiven for assuming there’s nothing particularly special about this fledgling 23-year-old singer-songwriter from Wiltshire. Another bird-nest-haired youth with a guitar. Another member of the post-Phoebe Bridgers, post-Adrienne Lenker cohort, leaning in to the new trend of earthy, homespun folk gaining popularity against the tide of ever more computerised, AI-driven music making. Another youngster visibly nervous as he tunes and retunes his guitar, looks to his bassist for reassurance, checks his set list.

And then Dermot Henry opens his mouth. His is a voice that could sing the phone book and make it hit like Nessun Dorma, adept at finding the sweet spot between skillfully controlled and exhilaratingly untamed, his effortless vibrato rattling urgently but never quite shattering. Stylistically, Henry’s music may tread familiar ground – twanging country-rock, piano ballads that take cues from America’s new piano ballad prophet Cameron Winter – but his sense of scale and ambition blows most of his contemporaries out of the water. Sure, Henry will slip in the occasional lyric about a pretty sunset or his love of forests, but it’s all the better for bowling you over with a pithy line about the nature of love, the certainty of death, the brutal absurdity of war.

The 200-odd crowd assembled for Henry’s debut Edinburgh show soak up this show with a sort of stunned silence that seems to genuinely take Henry aback. They rouse only to sing along to the plentiful gorgeous melodies on offer, starting with the marvelous My Favourite Book Is One I’ve Read a Bunch, a giddy love song so packed with poignant imagery (“I hold onto you like a drunken uncle clings to a gatepost”) that Henry seems to barely take a breath during the verses. His band are loose and lively, rising to a joyous cacophony of overlaid solos and drums chugging like a steam train reaching terminal velocity.

But Henry’s greatest strength isn’t his instrumentals or even his vocals, but his songwriting. Tonight’s tour through his entire released discography plus a generous helping of unreleased tracks for his upcoming debut album lacks a single dud. Thumping Dead Man’s Dog pairs endearing verses about youthful naivety with an eerily lonesome belted chorus: “Like a dead man’s dog / Each call is a ringing bell”. His quieter tracks hit just as hard, particularly the piercingly intimate Little Rib, which inspires perhaps the loveliest, gentlest audience singalong I’ve ever heard. “You made you?!” he later opines heart-breakingly, one of several new almost-love songs that marries infatuation with an uncomfortable sense this relationship may be too good to be true.

A backing band bulked out with extra fiddle swerves any momentary worries Henry may get too bogged down in his more maudlin solo ballads though. (I Wish I Was) Ennio Morricone for instance is an ecstatic slice of folk rock that leaves this small crowd whooping and hollering, whilst Pilots License implodes into a gritty alt-rock breakdown so loud I can feel the air quiver against my skin. Henry’s words never stoop below pristinely poetic, laced with surprising twists and intricate internal rhymes – although don’t ask me to interpret what he means by “being your Pyrex Kleenex T-Rex”.

Recent single I Love You, That’s All was always destined to work well as a closing number given its wistful title, but tonight Henry makes the bold choice to perform his soon-to-be calling card without his backing band to close the set (just as he did recently on Jools Holland). For lesser songs, and lesser artists, this would be an underwhelming finale, but I Love You is one of those rare perfect compositions that can stir your soul regardless of how it is delivered. Forget Phoebe Bridgers – this stunner evokes prime Paul Simon or McCartney, Henry’s piano descending plaintively over diaristic scenes of Henry’s visually impaired grandfather and emotionally repressed friend Matthew. I too find myself suddenly swallowing back my tears.

Unlike, say, Cameron Winter or Westside Cowboy, the indie music world doesn’t seem to have latched on to Henry yet. Perhaps he will headline Glastonbury in ten years. Perhaps he will keep plying his trade in poorly ventilated salsa bars in Edinburgh like this one. Tonight my fellow concertgoers gasp and giggle as we collect our coats and climb up the bar’s sticky steps back to street level. It’s as if we’ve just seen a shooting star.

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