Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones’s music has lengthy been related to blissful seashore scenes. Early evangelists for the Ibizan Balearic aesthetic, and stalwarts of untold chillout compilations, as A Man Referred to as Adam they make the form of music folks name “sun-dappled”. So it could shock informal listeners to seek out that their new album, The Lady With a Gap in Her Coronary heart, was impressed by deserted steelworks, poisoned shellfish and the cruel North Sea winds of the Teesside coast the place Rodgers grew up.

It’s not likely a radical departure, although. It’s nonetheless stuffed with disco, electropop and luxurious, lyrical downtempo moods – with the lyrics poetically abstracted somewhat than agit-prop or kitchen-sink realist. The pair first put it collectively remotely, throughout Covid lockdown, then collectively in north-east England simply as allegations of corruption round Teesside’s de-industrialisation had been rising. And this, Rodgers says, “supplied us with one thing to be indignant about, one thing to be proud about, every kind of feelings. It prompted me to put in writing about my childhood, too, and gave this document a way of place.”

The duo have been a musical partnership and shut pals since 1987, when Rodgers, a mod and northern soul fan who’d been in a few short-lived bands, recruited Jones, then a rockabilly and doo-wop obsessive, as a keyboard-player. At first, they had been funk and acid jazz aligned, however in 1988 they had been swept up musically and personally within the acid home explosion. Rodgers calls the period “a bit Camelot, a golden second” – and says that, of all musical kinds, home is the one one she feels comfy being affiliated with “as a result of it’s extra a church than a style”.

Of their studio in Rodgers’s semi-detached on the coast between Redcar and Saltburn, the pair’s relationship rapidly turns into clear. She does 95% of the speaking, whereas Jones will interject with a dry correction or apposite phrase. She is the poet, he the technician – although they co-produced from the beginning. Once they signed to Massive Life in 1990, there was an try and groom them as a pop-dance act. Nevertheless, they had been making tracks like Barefoot within the Head (named after a Brian Aldiss psychedelic sci-fi e-book) and Chrono Psionic Interface (with 12-minute Andrew Weatherall remixes). Though beloved of Balearic crowds, this was not chart fare.

In 1993, they went DIY with their very own Different label. Since then, they’ve managed to navigate a line between the home underground, crossover success with lush chillout ballads, academia (each have PhDs), and soundtracking artwork installations as Discrete Machines. However when Covid hit, they discovered themselves separated, Rodgers taking care of her aged mom within the north-east, Jones in a small condo in Paris. Piano-playing was Jones’s outlet: “I began placing palms on the keys. It turned a means of coping – then I’d discover good little chord progressions and jot them down. I’d make sketches and ship them to Sally.”

She began placing beats and lyrical concepts to them, capturing her personal sense of solitude. “Whereas Steve was plunking the piano in Paris,” she says, “I used to be strolling the canine 5 hours a day on the coast.” When Jones joined her to finish the songs in 2021, she says, “issues had been getting fairly intense spherical right here”. 1000’s of jobs had been misplaced within the 2010s, and scandals had been brewing across the sale of the Redcar steelworks. Then there was the mass die-off of shellfish alleged to be brought on by outdated industrial pollution stirred up by the dredging of the estuary for the Rishi Sunak-championed Teesside Freeport. Their imaginative and prescient for the document was drawn from what Jones calls “this lovely pure atmosphere with decaying business layered over it”. “And,” provides Rodgers, “60, 70 years of air pollution being stirred up!”

As all the time of their information, magnificence remained very important. “If we have now a manifesto,” continues Rodgers, “it’s to make music that touches folks, however that they will challenge their very own emotional life on to. The songs need to have deep strata. Individuals will say, ‘Oh, that was our first wedding ceremony dance tune, our funeral tune.’ You don’t wish to inform them, ‘Ah, that one was about despair, that one was about suicide, that one’s about an indignant breakup.’” There shall be extra direct reference to their inspirations in Individuals Powered: Tales from the River Tees, an exhibition in collaboration with Middlesbrough Institute of Fashionable Artwork and the Nationwide Portrait Gallery, which the pair are soundtracking this summer time.

However, with this album, A Man Referred to as Adam have created one of the crucial potent, bittersweet information of their 35-year profession. For all its grit, The Lady With a Gap in Her Coronary heart nonetheless carries the optimism of acid home and Balearic beats: Rodgers’s “golden second” of 1988. “It stays in your coronary heart,” she says, “and you would like it might for everyone.” There’s sunshine on the seashores of Teesside, too.

• The Lady With a Gap in Her Coronary heart is out on 26 Could on Different Data