Sam and Charlie are two producer-songwriters applying their singer-songwriter state of mind to genre-bending dance music. Their latest release, “Search & Destroy”, is a dreamy take on Iggy & The Stooges track by the same name, and it’s a banger. We has a chat to the house pop-duo to find out more about them and what lies in store for the talented twosome.

How did Glassio start?

Charlie: Sam and I first started hanging out the summer of our freshman year of college. We were both in Europe and had a mutual friend performing at Latitude (a music festival on the eastern shore of the UK) so we decided to make a trip of it. We spent a lot of time dancing, hanging out in between sets, and were pretty comfortable with each other after that point. We started collaborating upon our return to New York and also began helping a friend out with his own music at the time, which he was pretty serious about. The three of us began a band and were trying to turn it into something. We had a disastrous journey through the USA, trying to go on the road and being horribly underprepared for all aspects of it. Glassio came after all of that, as a new direction for our creative duo after those first NY musical experiences.

How would you describe your sound?

Sam: It’s soulful, feel good music, with an overall alt-pop/alt-dance sound. Our listening taste is all over the place, but we always end up anchoring our ears to certain visual ideas or thoughts. The slow-motion effect of flowers blooming, or time-lapse videos of huge cities are examples of things we keep in our heads when we make our music. We aim to make it sound vast, but also want to leave room for intimacy.

You are both singer-songwriters. Can you tell us a little bit more about your creative process?

C: Our creative process is pretty rewarding in the sense that it’s not repetitive. We work a great deal on songwriting and production together, from scratch most of the time, but also bring ideas of our own made in our spare time. We’ll sit down, work on a beat, chords, production ideas or melodies pretty much daily. We’re constantly communicating about music, new music, and genres and sounds we love, so that comes into play in the creative and production process.

You were raised in very different places (Sam in Dubai and Charlie in Paris). Do you feel like this has had an influence on your music?

S: I know that Charlie was very much influenced by post-punk, early 2000s garage rock that was huge in France – Arctic Monkeys, The Maccabees, The Strokes etc. When I was growing up in Dubai, the most popular artists were Destiny’s Child, 50 Cent and Shania Twain. That’s all they ever played on the radio when driving to elementary school. Destiny’s Child was my 2nd ever concert. I think that rubbed off on me melodically, and provided a pop sensibility, or a desire to make something catchy. My parents’ tastes were different though. My mom grew up in the 80s in Ireland and played a lot of new wave music in the car like New Order or Cyndi Lauper — something that would mix very interestingly with the sound of the Qur’an being sung from Mosques on the way home from school.

Your tracks are pretty chilled out. Is this how you are in real life?

C: That’s a hard one! On a scale of neurotic to chill, I think we might be closer to neurotic. We’ve been very chill in terms of situations we’ve come across as musicians, and New Yorkers in general though.

You’ve just released your rendition of “Search & Destroy” by Iggy & The Stooges – and we love it! Can you tell us a bit about it?

S: A few days after election night, I was walking down Grand St. in my neighborhood in Brooklyn to get dinner when I began singing a melody with the lyrics “I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of Napalm.” It felt very powerful. We decided to turn it into a full-on electronic cover. When you keep hearing the words “rebuild our military” over and over again from the speakers of your phone, and from the voice of somebody that gives you a lot of anxiety, it makes you worry about the prospect of conflict and what might happen to your homeland (for me, the Middle East). This cover was a personal prayer from us.

You’ve had a very successful EP, “Poptimism” and were featured in Spotify’s Viral Charts. Can we expect an album coming soon?

C: That means a lot, thank you! The immediate future is about releasing singles for us. We do have material we love on the sidelines though, so it might make sense to think of an album in the near future.

What’s next for Glassio?

S: We have a couple of new songs coming out in the next few months that we’re very excited about. We’re playing live a bunch and on the 4th Friday of each month host/DJ a party called House Etiquette at Ceremony — a fantastic new club in Brooklyn with an amazing crowd and wonderful Void soundsystem We co-host it with our bandmates Anthony Behn (releasing his own music soon under Brooklyn techno label Key + Needle) and Charles Fauna (releasing his new single “Hypnosis” this month). They make great music, so definitely check them out.