The single is the third in a run released this year with the producer Mera Bhai, and it is conceived as the mirror image of its predecessor "Hey You," a song about a tangled and miserable affair. Where that record picked at the scabs, this one throws open the window. The idea is neat on paper. In practice it feels like watching someone step off a kerb and discover that the pavement has politely declined to arrive.

Musically, "I Levitate" sits where electronic new wave meets alternative pop, and it keeps its footing in both. The family tree is a glamorous one: the shape-shifting eccentricity of Björk, the pelvic swagger of Prince, the android elegance of Janelle Monáe, the chrome precision of Daft Punk, and the Thin White Duke's gift for making strangeness feel like the only sensible option. Lesser records would be crushed by that guest list. This one wears it lightly, like a borrowed jacket that happens to fit, and then walks off in a direction of its own.

Mera Bhai deserves a medal for restraint. The production is bright and forward-leaning, built to make the listener feel weightless without ever feeling flimsy. Electronic pop so often mistakes cold for clever, but here the machinery is warm to the touch. The synthesisers behave less like gadgets than like weather, and the whole arrangement keeps its gaze pointed upward.

Then comes the voice, which is the point. Sunstroke Rain spent years sharing stages with Nina Persson and Robyn, two women who know a thing or two about wringing devastation out of a pop hook. That apprenticeship shows, but it has not made her a copyist. She sings with a conviction that has been a long time coming and is not remotely shy about arriving. The tone is powerful and ethereal at once, a combination that sounds like a contradiction until you hear it done properly. She does not wink at the listener or hide behind irony, and in a pop culture that treats sincerity as a security risk, her willingness to mean every syllable is almost an act of rebellion.

The lyric's central conceit, a love so total it makes you want to fly to the moon, could have been mawkish. It lands instead because the delivery commits completely. A singer who hedges her bets about rapture will never persuade anyone, and Sunstroke Rain hedges nothing. She sings like someone who has been to the other side of misery and come back with a better view.

Context sharpens the effect. At a moment when the news arrives as a daily avalanche of crises, a song that insists on hope and love might look naive. It plays instead as defiance, a small, glittering insurrection against the gloom. Pop has always done its best work in that mode.

"I Levitate" is not a retreat into escapism. It is a reminder of what the escape route was for. The record is confident, strange in precisely the right measure, and carried by a voice that deserved a spotlight years ago and has finally got one. Anyone in London on Sunday can test the theory at The Grace, where Sunstroke Rain plays this project live for the first time. On the evidence of this single, the floor may not be the only thing that gives way.