On paper The Womack Sisters are about as Nepo baby as it gets, but in practice The Womack Sisters is a record that shows us exactly what genuine inherited musical lineage is supposed to look like when it runs in the blood.

Growing up on stages and in studios across the world, Kucha, Zeimani and BG come from a lineage that could have opened every door in the music industry. The granddaughters of Sam Cooke, and neices of Bobby Womack, the sisters were repeatedly pushed into boxes they didn’t want to work in and pressured to modernise their sound, so they stepped away and got other jobs. In 2016 Gabriel Roth, co-founder of Daptone Records, heard the sisters sing and fell immediately in love, and nine years later after contract complications, false starts and patience, The Womack Sisters is here.

The album is recorded entirely on analog equipment live with the band at Penrose Studios in California, and it sounds like the Motown heyday of the sixties and early seventies, as a chamber group with vibraphone and strings plays with warmth and restraint. Roth also shaped Amy Winehouse’s sound on Back to Black, and he brings the same ethos here, believing that great soul music doesn’t need to be modernised as long as the right voices are singing the right songs.

The album opens with Chauffeur, a song about BG’s experience driving for Uber, and from that point plays like a best of compilation of singles. Every one of the eleven tracks is a perfectly written and performed highlight. Some are upbeat and bouncy, others are slow and gorgeous, and the whole record is dripping with class without ever being over the top. The instrumentation leaves space, particularly in the slower tracks, giving their voices room to breath. It’s impossible to tell the sisters apart, as their voices melt into one another.

The all-female vocal harmony trio has been one of the most persistent and beloved templates in popular music for decades. From The Supremes to Sister Sledge to En Vogue to Destiny’s Child, the formula keeps getting updated because women singing in harmony about sisterhood, love and strength works in any era. With the instinct of a trio who have been singing together since before they could walk, The Womack Sisters are the latest and finest example.

You Went Away Too Long sounds like a film soundtrack, as tender verses give way to a sparse but confrontational chorus. I Am Your Season features the whole band dragging beautifully behind the beat, swaying like a hammock as the wordless introduction from the sisters hangs in the air. The slow and yearning ballad Monster is a vehicle for heavy emotion delivered with restraint, and My Sisters and Me closes the album perfectly with lyrics practically lifted from We Are Family, and the question worth sitting with is why this doesn’t feel like a throwback. The instrumentation is decades old, and the arrangements are from an era that ended fifty years ago, and yet The Womack Sisters doesn’t feel like a reverential museum piece. The answer is the chemistry. Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black didn’t feel like a throwback because the personality, passion and lived experience of the singer were so present and current that the vintage setting simply became the most honest language available. The Womack Sisters has that same quality, making old music feel completely new.

It’s almost impossible to pick highlights from the tracklist, because every one of the eleven tracks is a ten out of ten song. The slower tracks steal the heart completely because they’re so gut-wrenching and convincing, and the arrangements work in complete service of the peaks and troughs of the stories being told, communicating the shifts in feeling as clearly as the lyrics do. This is how Motown worked at its greatest, with every instrument, chord and decision asking what story the band were trying to tell and how to serve it. It’s difficult to imagine anyone getting better work out of the Womack Sisters than Gabriel Roth and Daptone, and even the packaging is beautiful with a high quality sleeve. With eleven tracks in under forty minutes, and not a single moment wasted, The Womack Sisters is a record of deep feeling and high quality that’s beautifully made. They were raised with music in their DNA, and their singing sounds as joyful as a bird at the dawn chorus.

The Womack Sisters presumably turned down a great deal of offers and opportunities to wait for the right home, and their certainty gives this debut tremendous poise. The record deserves to be heard well beyond the world of specialist soul and funk radio shows, and if Amy Winehouse broke out of jazz circles and onto daytime radio playlists, then there’s absolutely no reason that The Womack Sisters shouldn’t do the same.