“Things were going our way,” Adam Melchor laments, “but they kept going ’til they were gone.”

“Joyride,” the latest single from the New Jersey artist, dwells on taking time to lament while still moving forward. The single is Melchor’s follow-up to his well-received EP Plan On You. The new song considers what it means to move on, painted with a gentle folk sound. It’s a precociously mature take on the passage of time and what gets lost, poetically written and tenderly unfurled in the song’s three-and-a-half minutes.

“Joyride” tells a dreamy story of a dilapidated Chevy stolen from a couple’s driveway, a story that soon signifies a couple’s understanding that their relationship has reached the end of its road. Melchor’s reedy warble works in tandem with a contemplative guitar strum and nostalgic trumpets, stretching a painful moment into something warm. The sound recalls the methodical orchestra of Beirut, or the soft lo-fi of Whitney, but without the self-seriousness that comes along with those styles. “Joyride” operates on a simple-enough analogy, but Melchor makes sure the device doesn’t get wrung out. He’s less interested in the art of the extended metaphor than in the art of letting go. “Joyride” isn’t resentful or hopeless the way you might expect a song centering on a breakup might be; instead, Melchor draws the song’s sadness from the pain of moving on, a regretful but clear-eyed look at a broken love that was once whole.

“Joyride” is a bittersweet goodbye, the sonic equivalent of a tired smile; there’s an honesty here that’s refreshing in such a young talent. Melchor takes the track’s loss and growth in stride, examining them as rites of passage in a much longer journey, and the result is something both heartbreaking and comforting.

Adam Melchor – Joyride (Official Video)www.youtube.com