Even after several years of an intense friendship that included recording pristine cover songs and spending several weeks touring Europe in a cramped van, I’m With Her were highly nervous when they went into the studio to see if they could write original material for a theoretical debut album.

“It’s like moving in with somebody,” says Sara Watkins, one-third of the folk supergroup that includes fellow Americana virtuosos Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Jarosz. “You can have a conversation, you can have a good time,” she adds of the band’s gradual, multiyear coalescing, “but really, you never know … it requires a certain amount of compromise.”

Lucky for music fans, the trio’s connection was as strong when writing as performing. “We were delighted to discover that it worked out really well,” Watkins says, with modesty, of the inspired sessions that resulted in I’m With Her’s mesmerizing, harmony-drenched debut LP, “See You Around,” released last month via Rounder Records.

By 2014, when the three women first performed together for an impromptu gig at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, they’d already carved out equally impressive, Grammy-winning solo careers. But the show — and more specifically, the feeling of simply playing music with one another — felt too good to not explore further. “It was like, ‘Wow, this is more special than just the casual festival run-in,’ ” Watkins, best known as a member of Americana trio Nickel Creek, adds of their initial union. Adds Jarosz, “It’s been magical from the first time we sang together.”

Still, with conflicting schedules and respective solo careers to attend to, making the band a reality required persistence and dedication on each of their parts. “We kept in touch and really made an effort to see each other,” Watkins notes, before adding with a laugh that the process of becoming an official band felt not dissimilar to dating. “We knew we wanted to do more with the band than just play a few shows here and there,” she adds. “But part of it was just the logistics and the timing and figuring out a way we would all be available.”

Less than a year after first meeting, the trio, soon after dubbed I’m With Her, made their union official: The three musicians began arranging select cover songs, booked a multiweek U.K. tour and released a two-song EP featuring beatific, harmony-drenched spins on John Hiatt’s “Crossing Muddy Waters” and Nina Simone’s “Be My Husband.” As Jarosz recalls, it was arranging those covers, and then recording and releasing them, that keyed her into the band’s long-term potential.

“It became clear that we had something to say in a voice that was different than our individual voices,” Jarosz says. Over the next year they’d sporadically reunite for songwriting sessions in locales from LA to Vermont. “And I think that’s when it really sunk in. Like, OK, this has a real future.”

They weren’t about to waste any more time: three weeks after finishing writing, the band enlisted producer Ethan Johns (Ryan Adams, Ray LaMontagne) and, in January 2016, they decamped to London for three intense weeks spent recording in the Wood Room at Real World Studios. Much like their earliest days, the trio had to acclimate to working with the producer. “I think it took us a week of just doing it to kind of figure out our vibes,” Jarosz remembers of them feeling out Johns. “We had to figure out what he was looking for and allow him to also find out what we were about as a band.”

Johns went to extreme lengths to capture the crisp sonic feel of the trio’s stunning, stacked harmonies, not to mention the intense energy of their live performance.

He positioned three chairs in the center of the studio, “with no microphones, no headphones, no isolation,” Jarosz explains, “so it was a very raw, stark bare-bones way to do it. But I think it was the way we needed to do the record,” she adds, “if only to capture the raw spirit of being a new band.”

Whether on the breezy “Ain’t That Fine” or the bluesy “I-89,” the trio’s effortless cohesion becomes abundantly clear. Aside from Johns, the three are the only instrumentalists on the album, but it’s the way their voices come together that stands out.

“I love singing with them so much,” Watkins says of her bandmates. “We really enjoyed the flexibilities in our ranges and we were constantly trying different things, switching up who sings in what register, basically just trying to get it so there’s interesting things happening and we’re not just repeating a similar blend over and over again.”

As for the band’s name being temporarily commandeered as Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign slogan, Jarosz says the association “has definitely come up a lot,” but they never considered changing their name. “Ultimately we decided to keep it,” she says, “because it really represents what this band means to all of us: camaraderie.”

Dan Hyman is a freelance writer.