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Lord knows what type of band my Sister and I would’ve formed when we were kids. Probably something along the lines of Whitney Houston fronting Madness with a touch of hardcore jungle, but that’s assuming we’d able to stop laughing/arguing/burning holes in the carpet long enough to get that far.

That doesn’t seem to have proved much of a problem for sibling duo Wild Belle, who reckon “a shared vocabulary of music, visual art and personality […means] so many decisions don’t even have to be discussed” (they probably don’t even fight over the remote control). Younger sister Natalie Bergman used to provide guest vocal spots with her elder brother Elliott’s afrobeat outfit Nomo, until she was awkwardly booted out after Nemo’s fans disapproved of the change in direction.

So they turned their attention towards the tracks she’d been creating on Garageband. Wild Belle was born, and they quickly built up a fanbase to put Nomo’s to shame.

That they’ve achieved this despite a voracious appetite for two of the most unfashionable musical elements you could utilise these days – reggae and saxophones – is a testament to their songwriting chops. Even more impressively, the tropical pop of their debut album “Isles” uses these elements in a way that manages to avoid being cringy (unless you think Ace of Base are cringy. In which case you’re wrong).

The band, who’ve recorded with similar boundary botherers Tom Tom Club, are aware that they might rub people up the wrong way, with Natalie admitting: “As white people releasing a song that has reggae in it, it could go both ways. People could be like, ‘Who is this hippy jam band?’, or they could believe we are being innovative and have a new sound”.

In the event neither description is true, but when you’re knocking out singles as brilliant as ‘Keep You’ there’s no need to be innovative. “Same song, again and again / You wrong me twice and I keep coming back,” sings Natalie, which is a pretty good description of this listener’s relationship with the track itself. Seriously, if this isn’t one of the best pop records to be released in 2013 I’ll drink my own weight in sun cream.

Other familiar moments include the carefree calypso of ‘Twisted’ (a style we haven’t heard since Lily Allen’s heyday), while the intro to ‘Backslider’ is so similar to 10cc’s ‘Dreadlock Holiday’ that you half-expect them to start offering opinions about cricket. When they depart from Carribean styles, such as on the enjoyably jilted organ ‘n’ guitar gambol of ‘Another Girl’, they strike upon the shore of The Duke Spirit instead, setting up camp with The Dead Weather while KT Tunstall starts a fire by rubbing two old guitar fretboards together.

Occasionally it slips down a little too smoothly. Elliott takes the mic on ‘When It’s Over’ in order to do an impersonation of what Julian Casablancas will sound like once the last drops of dwindling charisma drain away (in fairness, he has admitted that “Natalie’s just such a better singer than me, it’s embarrassing”; we’re not arguing). Things are better on tracks like ‘Happy Home’, where the smoothness is disrupted by some brusquely torn chords and ride cymbals played with angrily clenched fists.

The lyrics to that track (the chorus runs “Everybody in fancy clothes / But nobody really close / Everybody wear what family chose) are virtually the only ones that deviate from those that come from a malfunctioning heart – seriously, no woman can have been this frequently wronged since Frankie first shacked up with a philanderer named Albert.

Still, if they can keep spinning heartbreak into something that makes you want to draw back the curtains (pretending it’s sunny), open the window (ignoring the fact it doesn’t open properly) and sing to the world (oblivious to the neighbours calling noise control), then that can only be a good thing.