That voice—adenoidal, snarling, and echoing like Jeff Mangum singing inside of a beer can—is what you’ll notice first about Marcus Gordon, the young Australian who records with his band under the name Spookyland. “The Silly Fucking Thing”, which is the first song off his upcoming EP, Rock and Roll Weakling, doesn’t make any grand leaps past its sweeping British pop-rock template—it starts slow and stirs so grandiosely you can picture Chris Martin walking toward you in your mind’s eye.

But: that voice. It’s stuck in my head even as I can’t tell whether or not I find it grating. Gordon follows in the tradition of singers like Mangum, Bob Dylan, Joanna Newsom, and anyone so piercingly idiosyncratic as to make half their listeners automatically turn off in annoyance. He goes all the way, selling what could’ve been a routine song about love gone wrong with an utterly magnetizing vulnerability. It’s so raw and trusting that you want to handle it with care, unlike the heart he sings about that keeps getting carelessly broken.