It begins in hush. Serena Callasi sings the verses so close to the microphone that you can almost hear the room around her, her voice all air and hesitation, as though she's afraid that a firmer note might scare the feeling away. The pre-chorus tightens the screw, a slow inhalation set to music, and then the chorus detonates. Callasi abandons the whisper for a full-throated, chest-out belt, and Armin Silver's synthesisers surge in beneath her like a tide coming over a sea wall. It's a thrilling lurch, the sound of a heart making its excuses and then ignoring them.

The architecture is the clever part. The song was written by Matt Furman and Melanie Anstett as a tender ballad, and you can still feel that origin in its bones. Rather than disguise it, Aurora Bloom let the ballad and the dance-floor anthem share a flat and glare at each other. The verses keep their vulnerability, the chorus gets its strobe lights, and neither wins. That tension is the whole point. A song about being overwhelmed ought to sound like it can't decide between hiding and shouting, and this one does exactly that.

The record wears its influences with pride. Silver, whose fingerprints are all over the tempo and melody, has clearly spent years with Ellie Goulding's glacial yearning, CHVRCHES' steel-plated hooks and Zara Larsson's unembarrassed pop muscle. The breathy vocal tics, scattered through the song like gasps caught on tape, nod directly to that lineage. Yet the band never slips into pastiche. Where lesser disciples copy the sheen, Aurora Bloom have grasped the emotional engineering underneath it: the way a synth line can behave like a pulse, and the way restraint makes release feel earned.

Credit is due, too, to the unglamorous modesty of the production. Recorded in Furman's home studio, with the instruments laid down first and Callasi's vocals added later, "Breathless" has none of the over-lacquered gloss that big-budget pop mistakes for confidence. Instead it has intimacy, and the slightly wide-eyed feel of people who made something they love in a room they trust. Bruno Olufsen's guitar, Brett Henkel's bass and Morris Burr's drums keep the whole thing stoutly upright while the synths do their shimmering, a rhythm section that understands its job is to give the swooning a floor to happen on.

As an opening statement, "Breathless" is confident, tuneful and unafraid of feeling. It makes the old, daft, wonderful business of falling for someone sound like what it is: a small emergency with a brilliant soundtrack. The album arrives on 11 October. On this evidence, Aurora Bloom have earned a few deep breaths of anticipation.