Listen to the duo’s debut EP, released next week on Ital’s Lovers Rock label.

Daniel Martin-McCormick and his former Mi Ami bandmate Jacob Long have collaborated on a new project called Sleeper Cell.

As Ital, Martin-McCormick has been responsible for some of the best techno of recent years – his Planet Mu album Endgame was deservingly placed in FACT’s 50 best albums of 2014, while Long has been combining ambient and dub techno influences as Earthen Sea for over a decade.

The duo’s haunting debut for Martin-McCormick’s Lovers Rock label was recorded over three freezing days in New York this February, featuring a brittle, chilly sound that reflects the harsh weather conditions. Called Quality Of Life, the five-track EP is described by the label as reflecting a “declining America in a winter of its own”.

“We did talk a lot about all these recent fucked up stories in the news,” Martin-McCormick told Juno Plus recently of the theme behind the album. “The Eric Garner verdict had come through barely a month before and it felt like the country was coming to some kind of reckoning, all this latent anger and hatred coming to some sort of horrible climax.”

The duo’s collaborative sound lands somewhere between their respective styles, melding the sleek techno rhythms of Endgame with weathered dub textures, crumbling chords and and swells of noise – the label describes it perfectly as a collection of sounds that come together like “murky oil in a puddle of grimy water at the side of the road”.

Quality Of Life is released on 12″ format on July 20 – stream the entire thing below.