Riot Son doesn’t sound particularly interested in making himself comfortable. Hailing from Boone, North Carolina, the artist takes the quieter, inward-facing tendencies of contemporary alternative music and throws them out of the window on “PULSE”, a track that operates at maximum dramatic pressure. Rather than shrinking its world down to something intimate and easily digestible, the song expands until it feels almost widescreen — all shadow, velocity and oversized rock ’n’ roll ambition. There is nothing tentative about it; Riot Son wants the listener to feel the walls move.

His voice is the track’s most immediate weapon. There’s a vintage swagger lurking in the delivery, with traces of Elvis-era theatricality, but it is pushed somewhere more sinister and unpredictable. Behind him, London producer Philip Spalding, working as Flip X, keeps the arrangement in constant motion, allowing the song to veer between menace and spectacle. The arrival of its taut, angular new-wave passage brings a flash of Devo-esque eccentricity, only for the restraint to give way to a towering final surge of guitars and operatic intensity. “PULSE” has the instincts of a classic rock performance, but its execution belongs to a much stranger and more restless landscape.

The record’s journey across borders feels appropriate to its ambitions. Spalding’s connection to the production world of Martin Rushent — whose influential work intersected with records by artists including Joy Division, Buzzcocks, The Stranglers, The Human League and Generation X — adds another layer of history to the track, while the analogue mix and master by VE Beats in Quebec completes its international route. Yet despite that global construction, the emotional geography of “PULSE” remains firmly rooted in Appalachia. Riot Son’s “Appalachian Gloom” concept turns the isolation and harsher realities of the high country into something mythic, drawing from punk darkness, glam excess and the bombast of ’90s alternative without simply recreating any of them.

What makes “PULSE” compelling is its refusal to behave like a cautious introduction. Riot Son sounds as though he is already building toward a much bigger version of himself — one made for smoke, lights, amplifiers and rooms considerably larger than the bedroom. With his debut EP due August 12, Northeast shows on the horizon and a London date planned, the project is beginning to trace a route well beyond its Appalachian starting point. In an era where understatement can sometimes masquerade as sophistication, Riot Son makes a persuasive case for the opposite approach: bigger guitars, stranger instincts, more theatre and absolutely no fear of excess.