Start with the cast list, which is brief and exhausting. Between them, the duo play guitar, bass, drums, synthesisers, piano, violin and trumpet. They also engineer, mix and produce the thing themselves. Walker writes the music and does the lion's share of the instrumental labour. Hadidjenar, born in Indonesia and raised in Hamburg and Manchester, supplies the words and the voice. It is a division of labour as old as the Brill Building, though the Brill Building never needed to build its own synthesiser plug-in. Apple Eyes did, and named it after their cat, Lucille, who arrived in their lives shortly before the song did. I admire a band that treats the family pet as both muse and software engineer.

The Gallic lineage is plain, and gloriously so. Phoenix, Air and Daft Punk are cited as influences, and the record carries their gift for making machines sound affectionate. The synthesisers here do not bark or glower. They shimmer and glide, and they hold open a doorway into a warm, slightly faded past. That nostalgic glow is the song's chief colour, a sepia wash over bright electronics, like finding a favourite summer on an old tape and discovering it still plays. The nods to Bat for Lashes and the lovely oddness of Of Montreal temper the sweetness. They leave the arrangement a little askew, and the angles that peek through keep the polish from turning into plastic.

Then there is the voice. Hadidjenar sings with a clarity that never tips into fuss, and she has a knack for letting a melody breathe rather than pinning it to the wall. The lyrics take on life's twists and turns, its refusal to follow the itinerary we drew up for it. This is a subject that has sunk a thousand earnest songwriters, usually beneath a pile of clichés and a lot of rain. She keeps her footing by being specific where others are vague, and by sounding, throughout, as though she means it. The title, "Be", is a command, an invitation and a shrug all at once. The song wisely never decides which.

What elevates it above the merely charming is the engineering. A track that must sound spontaneous while being painstakingly assembled by two pairs of hands is the hardest trick in pop. The layers here are arranged with an architect's patience: drums that nudge rather than shove, a bassline with a lazy swagger, synth lines that climb and release at precisely the moment you want them to. Nothing is crowded and nothing feels like an afterthought. Several reviewers on the playlist circuit have already reached for "ear candy", which is accurate if slightly undersold, since candy rarely leaves you feeling this unexpectedly moved.

It is also, unmistakably, an uplifting record. Pop has a long and honourable tradition of smuggling melancholy inside a bounce, from the Smiths to Saint Etienne, and "Be" slots comfortably into that line. You can dance to it, and then, somewhere around the second chorus, you notice you are also thinking about your own life, which is the better trick.