OTHERLiiNE

“We’ve both got our own solo things, and it would have made everyone’s life easier to stick with those,” George FitzGerald tells Apple Music about OTHERLiiNE, his collaboration with fellow UK producer TJ “Lil Silva” Carter. “But we wanted to put this out because it deserves it.” The duo first discovered their chemistry when FitzGerald remixed Carter’s 2016 track “Lines.” After that, they continued to work together simply because it was fun. The music came, Carter says, “effortlessly and naturally”—OTHERLiiNE is the sort of relationship where just trying something for the hell of it can produce magic. “Often the best things happen when we’re near the end of the day, when we’re doing something where it’s like, ‘OK, that’s not really working, let's just start something,’” says FitzGerald, recalling how the ticking, bodily rhythms of “Hates Me” came together. “We got a microphone out and started clapping and hitting our chests. Once we had that on loop, the drums were basically a live jam, and then we put the piano down and TJ just threw out melodies. I heard him do that hook and was like, ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop! That’s the one!’”

Cross-pollinating multiple strains of electronic music with hip-hop and R&B, the project is too free-spirited to be constrained by genre definitions. “I wouldn’t call it house,” Carter says. “OTHERLiiNE, it’s another thing—something that comes together. He brings his world, I bring mine. We've got similar influences: grime, drum 'n' bass, off-beat drums, those basslines, just molded into this one thing.” The project also spotlights Carter’s talent as a singer and a lyricist. On “Hates Me,” he seemingly picks through a fractured relationship with words intended to let the listener hang their own interpretations onto the song. “I kind of got into a weird dark thing with [the line] ‘I never see when those angels leave.’ That angel could be anything to you. At the time, my mind went to this gory video of a kid on a street corner and gang violence. Tears around a body where this angel’s left. You can have a scene where angels leave and everyone's crying. And that angel can be anything to anyone—your missus, just anything. That spirit is what it is for you.”

Some tracks are pieced together with mesmerizing intricacy—Carter chopped together the drum sample on “Chimes” with parts foraged from across six folders on his desktop—but the opener “One Line” is a lesson in simplicity and restraint. “That’s probably the most straight-up dance floor track,” says FitzGerald. “A lot of the best dance music, things like Daft Punk, it’s simple hooks. One of the things that I’ve had to get used to is you can't overthink it. Like, TJ sings a really good hook, and it’s like, ‘Cool, that’s the hook.’ You don't have to turn it into some all-singing, all-dancing song. People don't want to tune in to entire songs on dance floors. They want something a bit more repeating.”