It opens with Paul Gilligan's guitar, a shimmering, rain-slicked figure that sounds like neon reflected in a wet pavement. Synths drift in underneath like fog rolling off a canal. Anyone who spent the early nineties in a damp bedsit with a four-track and a head full of Cocteau Twins, Spacemen 3 and Primal Scream's sweeter moments will feel the hairs on their neck stand up. Gilligan never lets the nostalgia curdle, though. These atmospheres are built with the patience of a man who has had a decade of silence to think about exactly where each chord should sit.

Then the drums arrive, and the whole thing lifts off the ground. Joe Brady plays with the forward lean of a man late for the last train, a propulsive, slightly breathless pulse that keeps the song moving even when the synths try to lull it to sleep. His vocal, grainy and unvarnished, carries the weight of someone who has actually lived through the lyrics. It owes nothing to the polished emptiness of the streaming age. It sounds like a human being in a room.

And then the song turns, because the third ingredient is Laura Hand. Her voice slides alongside Brady's like a hand finding a hand in the dark. She never fights the melody for attention. She deepens it, adding harmonic ballast and a cool, silvery sheen that turns a very good song into an exceptional one. When the two voices lock together on the chorus, the effect is startling: warmth and distance at once, intimacy and escape. The chorus doesn't so much arrive as materialise, and once it has, it will not leave your head for days. Hand joined the band only last year, yet she sounds as if she has been singing these songs since the Britpop wars.

The central idea is as old as rock and roll: grab the keys, abandon the dull and the dutiful, and vanish into the dark. The Elusives find new nerve in it. The song doesn't swagger. It aches, and this is a flight that is half rebellion and half longing, a wide-eyed bolt for the horizon by people who know exactly what they're leaving behind.

The production deserves a pat on the back too. The lo-fi home-demo spirit that the band nurtured for years has been kept, not scrubbed away. You can hear the grain, the air between the instruments, the faint wobble of real hands on real strings. Slick it up and you would lose the soul. Leave it raw and you would lose the sparkle. They have found the narrow, glittering seam between the two.

It would be easy to call this a comeback, but that wouldn't be right. The Elusives are not returning to anything. They are arriving, finally, and with a confidence that only decades of patience can buy. Their name was always a dare, a challenge to anyone who might catch them. On this evidence, the chase is worth it.

A gorgeous, grown-up, quietly thrilling debut. Play it loud, play it late, and keep the windows down.