Kevin Bronson on June 22nd, 2015

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As a producer, U.K.-born Alex Newport has a string of credits stretching back two decades, including work on albums by At the Drive-In, the Mars Volta, the Melvins, City and Colour and Bloc Party. It was while producing the latter band’s latest album “Four” that Newport bonded with drummer and fellow Brit Matt Tong over their “love of Can, cats, Sonic Youth and Serge Gainsbourg, and deep-seated anxiety about the hurried architecture of gentrification.” Says Newport: “I was starting to do a lot of co-writes and getting back to playing music myself, and before long I had quite a few songs that weren’t right for other artists I was working with, so I asked Matt if he’d be interested in collaborating on those songs and Red Love was born.”

The duo recorded an album last winter in New York, prior to Newport’s moving his studio headquarters back to L.A., where the album is being mixed. Far from the basic guitar/drum two-piece, the collaboration found both Newport and Tong singing and playing guitar, bass and keys on all the songs, with Tong handling percussion. For his part, Tong says the collaboration came along as he was “floating about in a fog of disorientation” after leaving Bloc Party, giving him a refuge in Newport’s meticulous studio work environment. “An interesting piece of music has emerged from it, the safe space,” Tong says. “The safe space echo.” The song first to emerge is the expansive, six-minute “Gone Tomorrow,” a shape-shifter inhabiting the post-rock and shoegaze worlds. “Here today / gone tomorrow,” it declares deliriously, and ain’t it the truth.

||| Watch: The video for “Red Love”