In July of 2022, small-town New Hampshire songwriter Noah Kahan burst onto the charts with his hit single “Stick Season” — a depressingly catchy tune about a man’s struggle to let go of a relationship with someone he left in the past. The song simultaneously captured the pain of leaving home and the memories that resurface in our darkest moments, striking a chord with Gen Zers as an anthem of arrival into adulthood. Upon release of the full album, “Stick Season,” the LP was hailed for Kahan’s innovative songwriting and relatable lyricism that seemed to harness all the excitement and melancholic nostalgia that comes with growing up in small-town America.

Somehow, in his deluxe record, Kahan manages to add to the ingenuity of the original tracks with a symphony of folk music as catchy as it is captivating.

In a flurry of incredibly touching lyrics and rousing melodies, Kahan wraps all the loneliness of life in the sticks into a poignant 28-minute package that remains a cohesive project and an inventive experience for the duration of its runtime. Kahan brilliantly blends lighter instrumentals and heavy explosions of harmony to make each song feel new and exciting — a task that he handles with ease due partly to the uniqueness of his perfectly twangy falsetto. While the original album stands as a masterclass of songwriting in its own right, the six additions serve as a welcome gift to his fans, further cementing the singer-songwriter as a force in the current cultural sphere.

It’s Kahan’s juxtaposition of slow, laborious melodies with his frightening bursts of emotion that take the listener’s attention immediately — and nowhere is that more apparent than in the production of the first track on this deluxe edition, “Your Needs, My Needs.” After opening with some extremely sensitive lines and softer guitar instrumentals, the song erupts one minute and 40 seconds later into a frustrated and self-loathing march about a man who watched what he loved shatter in front of him. It is intense and deeply cathartic, and a testament to Kahan’s versatility in the genre.

While each song stands on its own two legs as an impressive and addicting ode to the gray memory of Kahan’s formative years, it is his ability to ride the momentum of one track into another that makes this deluxe edition a truly coherent and compelling avenue of storytelling.

Kahan runs freely with this approach in his second track and a clear standout from the new batch of songs, “Dial Drunk.” The three-minute 33-second rocker rivals Kahan’s original hit single “Stick Season” when it comes to pure songwriting prowess. The song depicts another male character, this time a broken-down drunkard who can’t help but get himself into trouble at every turn. Each time, the man looks for the same figure from his past to save him from himself — each time, disappointing himself with the realization that this figure will never come. Kahan highlights the man’s dependency on someone he “no longer knows” and leaves himself completely emotionally exposed to his audience in doing so. The track’s overwhelming viral success should be all the evidence needed to understand the weight behind the artist’s words in this deeply human excursion.

Amazingly, Kahan is able to capture the same gloomy spirit that inhabits his opening two numbers four more times on “We’ll All Be Here Forever.” It cannot be overstated how effortlessly his haunting falsetto melds with the lyrics of his more lonely tunes, as it does in “Paul Revere” and “Call Your Mom.” In the latter songs “No Complaints” and “You’re Gonna Go Far,” Kahan recreates the loneliness of losing his youth with profoundly frustrated lyrics and percussion, driving home this six-song delight with another bittersweet tug on the heartstrings.

The lone flaw in these six tracks is that there isn’t more. Maybe a little more variety in the subject matter while remaining in the same thematic vein would have been appreciated, but otherwise, this deluxe edition was exactly what it should have been.

Short, sweet and undeniably depressing, Kahan flexes his viability as both a pop star and a folk idol in “We’ll All Be Here Forever,” leaving his audience hungry for more.

Rating: 4/5