Four songs into Allo Darlin’s debut album, frontwoman and songwriter Elizabeth Morris begins the joy-filled ‘Kiss Your Lips’ by telling of her and her paramour’s visit to a Parisian fairground, where after candyfloss and popcorn he decides to “prove to me your manliness” and win her a teddy bear. This, it must be admitted off the bat, is the sort of detail that still causes a lot of suspicion amongst many otherwise right-thinking folk. You could, if being uncharitable towards such things, also cite that Australian emigre Morris favours the ukelele, elsewhere on the album namechecks Motherwell indiepop heartbreakers the Just Joans and spends the rest of her musical life in a band, Tender Trap, with twee figurehead Amelia Fletcher. On the other hand, such guileless pop almost represents the true alternative in an increasingly sure of itself and its specific retro foibles, and the indie-pop scene, as the excellent recent album by their friends Standard Fare helped prove and the sleeper success of Indietracks Festival among other factors reinforces, is currently in particularly rude health.

Which is all very well, but you’ve still got to harbour the individual nous in order to step away from satchels and hairslides cliche. That’s just what Morris does, her playful but bittersweet lyrics finding a way to tell a story engagingly cut to the bitter quick with non-slushy sentiments intact. In that regard she makes a close lyrical approach cousin to Jens Lekman, an open hearted innocence parlayed into the language of love and loss and the musical accompaniment that isn’t afraid to head beyond usual jangle fare. Such lightness of touch enables Morris to find the right meaning in the smallest of detail. The flute solo bolstered ‘The Polaroid Song’ invokes the slow death of the titular camera film brand as a metaphor for the worries of a new relationship - “will we still look happy when we’re not so overexposed?” - while ‘Heartbeat Chilli’ prevaricates in the kitchen, and later in a lido observing the wrinkling of fingers in water, all the while waiting for the right romantic move to be made. That song also beautifully repurposes the first line from ‘Ring Of Fire’ as a chorus, the occasional drop-in of lyrical references – ‘What Will Be Will Be’ bases its chorus on ‘Que Sera Sera’, ‘Kiss Your Lips’ actually breaks into a gang vocal, fully cited steal from Weezer’s ‘El Scorcho’ – only seeming endearing.

Some have attempted to make links between Allo Darlin’ and Hefner, which goes so far in that they both share a confident loucheness of playing borne equally out of Jonathan Richman’s example, but by direct comparison this album comes across as sunnier and more optimistic about how relationships develop. ‘Dreaming’ pitches the conflicted emotions of Camera Obscura into a duet with Brighton scenester and Pipettes founder Monster Bobby, who especially for the occasion has approximated the baritone vocals of the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt, a swooping, swooning pop morsel about the impulsive heart (“It’s freezing out here on the pavement, but here in your arms it’s heaven/I can wait for you now but not forever”) that finds room for a lap steel solo. The Go-Betweens go surf of ‘Woody Allen’ attempts to cast the stars and producer of their love story and comes out of it oddly favourable, not least through the line “sometimes it gets bad, (but) it never gets Bergman bad” and a triumphant ending of “Max von Sydow couldn’t play you”. Most impressively, ‘Let’s Go Swimming’ rewrites the Magnetic Fields’ ‘All The Umbrellas In London’ via Belle & Sebastian circa If You’re Feeling Sinister to create a seeming defiant portrait of a single quietly beautiful spot in time, hazy slide guitar and imagery of hanging out by a Swedish lake in high summer capturing a moment beyond the kens of “all the hipsters in Shoreditch… (and) all the bankers in Highgate”.

When we talk about records fit for summer, we mean one that evokes lazy, crazy days of warm sun by means of unhurried ease and glorious melody. Allo Darlin’ certainly do all that, and ‘The Polaroid Song”s appreciation of “dancing on my own to a record that I do not know in a place I’ve never seen before” pretty much nails it. Get it home, though, and there’s just as much to admire in the smart lyrical touch that belies any sort of scene connotations, a fine romance borne from catching hold of the little things.