Since their sinuously insistent debut single ‘Funn’ appeared online earlier this year, swiftly followed by equally compelling track ‘Pulse’, this duo have been pulling in tastemaker tips and piquing industry curiosity. Combining a strong aesthetic - the arresting videos for both songs position contemporary dance against stark urban settings - with a genre-defying mix of synths, samples and spectral pop.

Tim Ross (Cash) and Liz Lawrence (David) first came together creatively five years ago, when Ross produced Lawrence’s debut solo album for EMI, recorded when she was just 19. While Lawrence’s album was folk-inspired, the pair were struck by the similarities in the influences they found mutually galvanising, from Phoenix to Bibio, via Surfer Blood and The xx. They spent some time pursuing their own projects, with Ross continuing to work in production and arranging jobs, whilst Lawrence joined Bombay Bicycle Club’s live band, a spot that has also been occupied by the likes of Lucy Rose and Rae Morris.

A feeling of unresolvedness and a mutual desire to get back into the studio led to Tim instinctively calling Liz out of the blue… “I really wanted to smash down creative constructs, reimagine and rebuild. I couldn’t and still can’t think of a better partner for that than Liz.”. Their initial collaboration took the form of a speculative Christmas jingle for a TV ad - the beginning of many a great partnership, after all - though they were unjustly bested by a funky house submission, sparking a deep-set mistrust of the genre.

However, the seeds of Cash+David had been planted. Lawrence raised the idea of the pair working together on some electronic music using “the weird little loops and samples” she’d been collecting since her debut record. Frustrated by the static, solemn and beardy nature of folk music, Lawrence wanted to try her hand at music to make people dance. Ross, who had originally studied classical orchestration and modernist composition, had meanwhile just finished arranging strings for a Bloody Beetroots album, an intensely satisfying experience which rekindled his creative fire. “I’d done too many jobs just to pay the bills, and that Beetroots gig reminded me what I actually wanted to do.” Ross suggested he and Lawrence head into his studio-cum-shed in the south London suburbs.

Combining Ross’s long-standing nickname and Lawrence’s daydream of a concept band whose every member would be called David, the duo began to make the music they had both carried in their heads for a long time. It was the beginning of a turbo-charged honeymoon period. “We had these sounds, we had these names we’d put together - it was like we’d just got married,” reflects Lawrence.

The tracks written during this period shimmer with precisely-executed, impulse-driven songwriting and production. ‘Funn’ (which was reimagined as a dreamlike Dakytl remix in July) stitches together Lawrence’s disembodied voice with slabs of crunch guitar, reflecting a love of such genre-bending acts as Sleigh Bells and Poliça. Its beat-driven follow-up ‘Pulse’ places Lawrence’s vocals atop eastern-influenced synth loops, bongos and circular guitar hooks, with its night-out lyrics telling a story of abandon and oblivion: “I forgot who I was / at four in the morning / I was out to get lost…”.

Their next single ‘Bones’ is a stark and direct affair, which, taken with its predecessors, completes something of a triptyque. “‘Bones’ is a more straight down the line pop tune,” explains Lawrence. Though its sentiment is vulnerable, the morning after the night before - “Call them off, call the dogs off / Cos I’m already weak enough / Beg the sun not to rise again…” - it is refracted through Cash+David’s prism of influences, combining their pop sensibility with their signature bass-heavy synths and insistent rhythmic loops.

Cash+David’s meticulous approach extends far beyond the music they are producing, with Lawrence’s art school education dictating a precise and detailed aesthetic, reflected in everything from their interlocking logo to the arrestingly, interlinked artwork of all three singles, even the sequence of ambiguous couples who appear in the tracks’ accompanying videos (directed by James Willis, also behind Disclosure and Katy B visuals). The striking, black and white clip for ‘Funn’ saw an epicene Johnny Cash and David Bowie locked in a dance battle, whilst ‘Pulse’ tracks a lone male dancer’s journey through a shady urban backdrop to meet his girl.

All three singles to date have been released on Cash+David’s own label, +, “There was a real frisson between Tim and I when we met,” says Lawrence, “We’re integral to each other, and that’s reflected in the name, the logo, the label, everything we do. It enables movement, and space.”

Cash+David are Tim Ross and Liz Lawrence. Together, they form an equation that is about to become truly greater than the sum of its parts.