‘Life ain’t easy these days,” sighs Lauv - AKA 25-year-old Ari Leff - on Changes, a track that covers the musician’s decision to medicate his mental health struggles. It’s an observation that may seem evergreen – all generations are inclined to hand-wring over their lot – but on his debut album, the California-born singer-songwriter convincingly argues that young people have never had it so bad. How I’m Feeling doesn’t just bristle with enduring afflictions such as heartbreak and addiction, it’s also full of no-filter confessionals about coming of age in the social media era: the isolation and disconnect (see: Fuck I’m Lonely, Lonely Eyes, Modern Loneliness), as well as technology’s identity-eroding effects.

This heart-on-sleeve approach might well be genuine, but Gen Z malaise is also big business: from Billie Eilish to melancholy emo-rap stars, performed alienation and anxiety is currently all the rage. Lauv is well-versed in industry trends, having previously penned hits with Charli XCX and Demi Lovato, and he mostly couples his timely observations with a similarly voguish mid-tempo electropop. Restrained and airless, it is the kind that sounds as if every beat has been placed with a pair of tweezers, and that you have to listen to three times to work out which bit is the chorus. It’s not a particularly thrilling or inventive mode, but then How I’m Feeling isn’t designed to knock the socks off whole populations. Rather, its lightly worn melodies and generically hip sonics seem machine-tooled to creep into its target audience’s subconscious, where its tales of youthful disaffection can be readily absorbed into their own tumultuous inner worlds.