Cate Le Bon’s collaboration with White Fence’s Tim Presley feels sickeningly effortless.

In fact, it’s undeniable that some small part of the fun comes from imagining the day-to-day life of the LA-based pairing of nimble-fingered Welsh goddess and psych rock master from San Francisco. Imagine them at an ultra-plastic megastore, looking far too warm in their striped turtlenecks. Imagine them bobbing down the bleached white of the LA coast under the Hollywood sign. Imagine what they order at the bar.

Anyway. When’s the last time you listened to psychedelic rock that was genuinely witty? All the perfect silences and crescendos we saw in Le Bon’s smartly sparse Mug Museum aren’t just borrowed by the messily polished nature of the music of Hermits On Holiday – her flawless internal metronome also gives it spot-on comedy timing. ‘Tim, do I like that dog?” Cate asks in her Welsh lilt on the gloriously weird pseudo-skit Tim, Do I Like That Dog?

The riffs are complex but trip up and down the fingerboard with certainty, the drums are wild but purposeful. Everything is so sure in what it is and what it’s about that you can almost imagine the intercontinental pair accidentally meeting on a bench somewhere, a chemical reaction occurring and the two immediately sneezing the whole album out in one afternoon.

There’s so much to love on this album: on the press release it’s pitched by Presley and Le Bon as “a solo project, not a collaboration… one mouth, one set of lungs, one mind and four legs”. Its meeting of minds makes so much sense that there should be a new load of rock stars on the next plane to LA hoping to bump into each other any second now, hoping to capture that same DRINKS magic.