Some debut singles announce themselves. Florence Rose Broomfield’s just sits down next to you and tells the truth. “When You’re Here,” published October 28, is a folk song built from almost nothing — voice, guitar, and a violin melody from Marika Tyler-Clark — and it’s about one of the loneliest feelings of modern life: being beside someone whose attention is somewhere else entirely, watching them disappear into their phone while they’re still in the room with you.

“It’s about feeling the lack of someone’s presence when they are around you because they are tied to their phone,” Broomfield says, and the song doesn’t need to say more than that. The Line of Best Fit picked it for their New Music Discovery playlist, and the comparisons they’re drawing — Jessica Pratt’s first album, Vashti Bunyan’s pastoral folk — are exactly right. This is music that trusts quiet: a melody that doesn’t push, a vocal that doesn’t perform its own sadness, a fiddle line that enters like a second voice in the room.

Debut singles are usually judged on potential, and “When You’re Here” has plenty of that. But it’s also, simply, a complete song — a small, precise observation about attention and absence that will feel familiar to almost anyone who hears it. Broomfield is a name to remember. This is a very good place to start remembering it.

The coverage so far has been exactly right about the reference points. The Line of Best Fit and Dork both picked up the single on October 28, and the comparisons to Jessica Pratt’s first album and Vashti Bunyan’s pastoral folk capture something real about Broomfield’s approach: songs that do not need to raise their voice to be heard, arrangements that leave space for the listener to step inside. The lyric video, directed by Seb Gillmore, keeps that same restraint, letting the song’s central image — presence without attention — do the work. For a debut single, it is remarkably assured, the kind of first release that makes you want to hear whatever comes second.

Rating: 4.5/5

LISTEN