If a lifetime of living seaside in various parts of England has instilled one thing in Brighton-based siblings Lily and Jack Wolter, it’s that there’s something fantastically meditative about being by the ocean. That reality helped shape Until the Tide Creeps In, the super-confident debut album by Penelope Isles.

“Whenever I’m away from the ocean I definitely get withdrawal,” singer and multi-instrumentalist Lily Wolter says, on her cell in a van heading towards Boston. “It’s funny—it’s not like I’m a pro surfer or a swimmer or anything, or that I’m even in the water every day. What I like is that there’s something really calming about it. Being by the water has been a big influence, including in our songwriting. There’s something about it that’s really emotive. We were just talking about how your surroundings can impact things. It just started raining here and the boys in the van were like, ‘I feel like writing a song.’ ”

On Until the Tide Creeps In, the Wolters—along with bassist Jack Sowton and drummer Becky Radford—combine gauzy beach pop with pastoral shoegaze and feedback-drenched alternative rock. Much of the beauty of the album is found in its contrasts; consider the way “Cut Your Hair” balances pillow-soft vocals with rumbletown bass and how the dreamy “Gnarbone” is suddenly swamped by a tsunami of distortion.

The roots of Penelope Isles can be traced back to Lily moving from the Isle of Man to Brighton to start a music course, arriving at school with a bedroom project she called KookieLou and often playing on acoustic instruments like the bass ukulele. For her final school project she wrote the 2014 EP KookieLou, after which she was determined to realize her dream of forming a band. Helping her out on that front was her brother.

“We had a year of playing live, which is when the songs started to naturally adapt,” Lily says. “They became more guitar-based because of Jack’s fantastic guitar riffs. What happened is things really started to move away from being a lo-fi, bedroom thing.”

Despite that evolution, Until the Tide Creeps In ended up very much a DIY effort. The band began recording in a friend’s studio in Eastbourne, England, and vintage equipment helped make the process a memorable one. But eventually, it began to feel like a controlled environment was impacting where the songs wanted to go.

“What we were making sounded great, but it was like the magic wasn’t there,” Lily says. “I think the problem was that there was always an underlying sense of time and pressure. There wasn’t total room to relax and take the helm. So we made the decision to stop and then start again, doing everything ourselves. We had endless nights until 3, 4, and 5 in the morning where we experimented with different instruments—keyboards, Hammond organ, and xylophones—and really zeroed in on what was working.”

What Penelope Isles ended up with is a transportive record perfect for sitting meditatively on the shores of the ocean of your choice. That’s a dream for the band’s members at the moment—not that Lily’s complaining.

“After we finished recording, we did South by Southwest and Eurosonic, and a bunch of showcases, and then it was festival season back home, which kept us really busy,” she says. “The album came out in July, and since then we’ve been going nonstop. I sometimes feel trapped when I’m away from the sea. But it’s also hard not to feel like we’ve been blessed.”

Penelope Isles plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Tuesday (October 29).