Both Skye and Ellery grew up far from the city. Ellery was raised in coastal Cornwall, on the southwestern tip of the UK. Her mum, a music therapist, encouraged her to learn the violin from the age of 5, and Ellery remembers adoring romantic composers like Tchaikovsky and Brahms in her youth. At 14, things took a left turn when she got into house music and started attending weekend-long Cornish “barn raves.”

Skye’s parents also encouraged him into music from an early age, having met while working as musical theater actors in London’s West End. After quitting the stage to become teachers, the family moved to a market town in the East Midlands when Skye was around 10. He played the piano, but the exams incapacitated him with nerves. “Playing other people’s music really scares me,” he says. After his dad gifted him a laptop with Logic on it as a teen, Skye started recreating tracks by his favorite big-room EDM producers like Skrillex and Flux Pavilion. “Some of it was a bit Philip Glass-y,” he remembers of his first compositions, “but in, like, a dubstep style.”

For each, moving to London at 18 opened up the world. After feeling low and confined in his rural hometown, Skye was ecstatic to find that a number of his favorite electronic artists—Rustie, Plastician, Skream, and Benga—were all playing just up the road from him in his very first week in the city. He and Ellery shared a composition class and gradually noticed each other on social media; he saw on Facebook that they had both seen James Blake live, and she listened to his productions. After their first proper meeting in the Basement, Ellery began sending Skye some demos that she had worked on privately, asking for his input. Skye frequently had totally different ideas about how Ellery’s songs should sound, and they both loved the dissonance created by that back-and-forth.

“They are Georgia’s songs; I don’t help with the lyrics,” Skye insists. “Whenever I work with someone else, I don’t see the point of trying to figure out what they’re saying, because you don’t really know what they’re saying underneath—‘he broke my heart’ could mean millions of things. So I think the sound of what’s going on is what’s more interesting to work with, and that creates accidental clashes.”