R&B has always played a crucial role in pushing the edges of sensuality in pop. One of this year’s steamiest projects comes from an unexpected source — a collaboration between Lido, known in recent years for making electronic music, and Santell, whose SoundCloud page currently features just three songs. The two combined forces for a short EP, The Passion Project, which is out today.
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Lido has been busy in 2015, but his prominent credits don’t necessarily suggest an interest in lusty slow jams. In the spring, he teamed up with the French producer Canblaster for Superspeed, a stop-start, neck-snapping electronic EP. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Lido helmed several tracks on Halsey’s Badlands: these songs favor plodding tempos and lean towards theatrical, spare rock.
But last year, Lido met Santell during a writing session for the Mad Decent artist LIZ. “I heard his voice,” Lido remembers, “and I was like, ‘wow, that is something different. That signature in his voice is something way different — I need to work with this guy.” The two artists clicked immediately.
The passion in the EP’s title is not just physical — it also refers to the duo’s shared zeal for R&B. Over the phone, the two artists excitedly trade reference points. “I’m really into early 2000s R&B, when it was just infiltrating hip-hop in such a strong way,” Lido explains. “Bad Boy R&B is always so tight,” Santell adds. “It’s so tough, but tender at the same time.” “I always used to be the hugest Michael Jackson fan,” he continues. “My brother used to hide deep cut R&B albums under my pillow — I’d like wake up to Blackstreet CDs under my pillow. That spawned a whole relationship with R&B; this ain’t nothing new.”
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The Passion Project reaches for the genre’s libidinous wing — the stuff of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, Prince’s “Do Me Baby,” and R. Kelly’s 12 Play. The EP opens with “Ashley,” a hapless love song set in a strip club; the narrator falls for his waitress, who barely notices him. The hook lists a series of names, bringing to mind the Dream’s 2007 debut single, “Shawty Is Da Shit:” “I could have had Crystal, Mercedes, or Keisha/ but they ain’t you/ I just want Ashley.”
According to Lido, “the entire EP is inspired by real life events in some sort of way.” In the case of “Ashley,” “we started to make the beat but we didn’t really know what to do with it. A bunch of friends of mine called and were like, ‘we’re in L.A., do you want to go to the strip club tonight?’” They went, and Lido was smitten with his waitress. “We literally left the strip club and went back to the studio at 4 a.m.,” he recalls. The creative block was gone, and a love-struck Lido put the track together with Santell’s help in a couple of hours.
The smutty centerpiece of The Passion Project is “Pillows,” which constructs a beat from orgasm noises and the sound of an angry neighbor knocking on the door. (Lido won’t say whose late-night exploits inspired this one.) “When I produce stuff I think very literally,” he notes. “I love creating places in my production.” The combination of bedroom clamor and angry neighbors “was way too cool of a sonic thing not to mess with.”
“Pillows” also makes impressive use of dynamic shifts. Lido keeps removing elements from the track and then slamming them back in with renewed force for expressive, roaring crescendos. These loud surges evoke music from two decades ago, when full bands like Mint Condition were popular and emotive ballads penned by Babyface ruled the charts. Santell dexterously weaves through the shifty instrumental, heaping his voice in humid layers.
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Through its commitment to pleasure, The Passion Project offers an antidote to some of the more serious moods that dominate R&B in a post-Drake world. “We’re not trying to fit into trends,” Santell says. “We’re not trying to make music for radio. We’re not trying to be cool.”
“If we were the only people that would hear this EP,” Lido adds, “we would be thrilled with that. I would have this EP on repeat myself. This is the stuff that we really love that we never get to do.”