Hope / Satin / Glass / Dreams

"Sex can be scary and exhilarating and terribly not allowed all at the same time,"says Rebekah Raa. She should know – her new EP as one half of London avant pop duo Rainer braves the menagerie of emotions that come with bedroom trysts and a brand new relationship. Happiness. Melancholy. Neediness. Insanity. Tangling pop vocals with sleek cracked beats on a bed of cinematic synth swells, it's a record with the burning night time feel of a Burial nocturne and seductive shimmer of a Chromatics slow dance but blockbuster hooks of a pop chart-topper: a love affair with your headphones waiting to happen.

If there's a vividness to Raa's tales of lust and lament it's because she's endured her own share of complicated relationships. "Glass and Dreams on the EP started life when I was coming out of an 11 year relationship and getting into a new one with one of his best friends" she shares sheepishly. "It was the most difficult time of my life. I was drinking a lot and not taking care of myself." Then there's Satin: a song "about telling your boy to come home from that party he shouldn't be at because you're pretty much naked and waiting for him" driven by the most throbbing clubland pulse courtesy of producer band mate Casually Here, real name Nic Nell.

"We met a few years back through mutual friends," says Nell, who's also worked with the likes of Alessi's Ark and is one half of Young Colossus with the Maccabees' Orlando Weeks. "When her old band Stricken City decided to call it a day Rebekah had started working on some songs for herself. Initially I asked Rebekah to sing on a track of mine and working together slowly evolved into a shared project, with us writing and making the whole thing together. Now it's totally me and her, a shared sonic vision."

Influenced by "music to listen to staring out of the window of a night bus on the way home to, or walking home through the empty streets and estates around Elephant and Castle" as well as ghoulish hip-hop sounds (producers Clams Casino and Hudson Mohawke especially), theirs is as unique a blend of sounds and inspirations as imaginable, thinking nothing of laying choirs and clarinets over banging electro noises or crashing grand operatic strings into calypso vibes, as on EP opener Hope.

"That's a song about finding happiness in the someone you least expect," says Raa. There's plenty of happiness to be found on this debut EP: melancholy, neediness and insanity too. And like sex, it's an exhilarating release, so don't abstain.