Vancouver musician Jay Arner is stepping out from relative anonymity with a self-titled album on Mint (out June 25). The cover is a photo of his gaunt face, his eyes unfocused and deeply ambivalent. It's not an arrival so much as a gentle throat-clearing: "I don't know where I live/Got off the bus at the wrong stop," he sings in his flat, calm voice on "Midnight on South Granville," after a minute and a half of murmuring new-wave keyboards and guitars give him a bustling space to slip into inconspicuously.

This sort of underplaying sometimes means people don't pick you out in a crowd, but Arner expertly folds sour feelings into his semi-sweet sounds, and as "Midnight On South Granville" accumulates quivery layers of analogue synths and builds gracefully to its conclusion, it becomes quietly riveting.