It is as if, in the best way, the 1990s had never happened: as if the Beatles hadn't continued to exercise a stifling hegemony over popular music, as if Britpop had never made it out of Camden, sports-metal had never made it through customs and stage-school chart pop had remained the fantasy of a deranged geneticist. Delays are a four-piece from Southampton with a debut single, Nearer Than Heaven, that is pretty much giddy pop perfection.

The official line on Delays is "the Hollies meets the Cocteau Twins", which is a reasonably neat way of referencing their confection of airy, tumbling melody, late-1960s harmony pop and the delicate miracle of singer Greg Gilbert's voice. I'd add the weightless grace of the Sundays, and Thieves, David McAlmont's pre-Bernard Butler band, whose sole album (released under McAlmont's name) builds densely layered epiphanies around a muscular keyboard pulse - the last hurrah of 1980s avant-pop.

There is nothing remotely avant about Delays, however. They are, to put it glibly, a boy band, making pop music like no one bothers to make it any more. Nearer Than Heaven is the kind of irrepressible, life-enhancing intoxication that sounds like distilled sunshine. It is a joy to hear in the grubby Monarch, dank with the whiff of relentlessly indie underachievers. Gilbert has an effortless, pure falsetto capable of remarkable swoops and trills; it is a million miles from the mewling hordes that follow in the wake of Thom Yorke, Jeff Buckley or Coldplay's adenoidal Chris Martin. It makes even a comparatively straightforward song like Hey Girl bewitchingly feminine.

There has to be a catch, of course, and here it is: Delays are grippingly, enthusiastically uncool. They have a grizzled drummer, a blank-looking bassist and Greg's brother Aaron, who gurns behind his bank of keyboards, looking disturbingly the very spit of Kula Shaker's Crispian Mills. Perhaps, though, now that you can walk into Top Shop and come out looking like the Strokes, Delays are beyond cool, refreshingly unconcerned. And so they should be. After all, they have the songs.

· At the Zodiac, Oxford, on May 7. Box office: 01865 420042. Then touring.