Put the pencil away. Cousins has done something rarer than a good cover: she has made a persuasive argument that the song was always a piece of chamber music in disguise. Strip off the Eighties gloss and what remains is a melody of real architecture, all rising stairways and sudden drops. Cousins, who arranged the piece herself, treats it with the seriousness of a Schubert lied and the affection of a lifelong fan. She grew up on A-ha, and the love shows in every bar.

The quartet, an all-female ensemble she has christened Suite Jane (a pun on the Cowboy Junkies' reading of the Velvet Underground classic, and a good one), plays with the discipline you would expect from musicians who cut their teeth in the classical world. Yet nothing here sounds dutiful. The strings do not simply replace the synth line; they argue with it, sigh around it and, in the climactic stretches, push the song somewhere the original never went. The cello provides a warm, patient floor, while the violins take the famous hook and turn it from a gleaming pop slogan into something wistful and slightly bruised.

Then there is the vocal. Cousins wisely does not attempt to out-soar Harket, a fool's errand that has ended many a cover. Instead she sings the song as though she had just discovered it, with a clear, unforced delivery that favours the lyric's longing over its acrobatics. When she reaches for the high notes, she does so with a human tremor, and the tremor is the point.

That humanity is the single's calling card, and Cousins knows it. She has said this is a record "everything that AI music is not", and while that might sound like a slogan, the recording backs it up. The four players performed together in one room at Ol Elegante studio in Birmingham, Alabama, and the finished track blends their individual microphones with the sound of the room itself. You can hear the wood, the air, the tiny collective intake of breath before a phrase turns. In an age of grids and quantised perfection, these gentle imperfections land like a hand on the shoulder. The hand-drawn artwork, by a local artist, completes the picture: this is a small, handmade object, and proud of it.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as novelty, a clever swap of instruments and little else. But novelty fades by the second listen, and this single only grows. By the final chorus, the song's old, aching optimism has been restored, with the neon polish traded for candlelight. It sounds like a love letter written with a steady hand.

Cousins is due to bring this and other covers to Girls Rock Fest, a festival celebrating women in music, which seems exactly the right home for it. On this evidence, her original material deserves a very close listen indeed. In the meantime, "Take On Me" is a small triumph: tender, intelligent and gloriously alive.