Chase & Status are back with a new single, the ferocious Let You Go which features new talent Mali and is released on August 15.

In the first of a two-part series, MistaJam.com writer Sam Moir caught up with the duo, who talked about everything from their early beginnings, the success of their debut album and the pressure of working on its follow up.

For the past few months, Chase & Status have been balancing their time between DJ sets, two live tours, and crucially, extensive studio sessions, as they continue to craft the much anticipated follow up to their debut album, More Than A Lot.

But let’s go back to the beginning. Will and Saul met through a mutual friend when they were both 18 years old. “My friend said Will had a nice set of decks at his house, a good mixer and you can smoke in his room. At 18 years old, that’s all you need to hear, so I dropped round his house after college with a bag full of records… I didn’t even have a record bag.”

“We started going out to The End, which was a seminal night club in London, which has now unfortunately closed. We would see each other at all the raves and then I went up to Manchester. Will did about a year later and we were just DJ-ing everywhere we could, thinking we were the best DJs in the world.”

It was at university that they became serious about their music, ultimately deciding to quit their studies in order to focus solely on their careers as producers. Having dropped out, “We just spent five years underground in Manchester, writing beats obsessively and not doing anything else.”

A watershed moment for the boys came in 2003 when their first piece of production, Like This was released on Vehicle. “That first release was obviously a big high for us.  It was a time when we were trying to get our foot through the door. It’s very hard when you’re coming through and getting people to hear your records, let alone get them signed.”

Following this breakthrough, they began working with Tempa and Bingo. “Shortly after that, we met DJ Zinc who wanted beats and at the time, we were young and unbelievably buzzing. That was massive and we just jumped on the opportunity.”

It has been a whirlwind seven years for the duo ever since. In reference to their early releases on DC Presents, Vehicle, Bingo and Hardware, Saul tells me, “Every year, we’ve had a key moment, a batch of songs that have really opened us up, culminating in the album in 2008, which has opened more doors than we could have expected.”

An album that, according to Beatportal, is ‘packed with differing musical flavours that represents the changing face of breaks-led electronic music.’ Eastern Jam still gets that precious rewind in the clubs.

“That album wasn’t just a couple of weeks in the making; it was two years of our lives, there was another 13 tracks that got scrapped and these ones are the ones that stuck.”

“Your interests change, what you’re into changes, the dynamic of the scene changes. You might have written a song at the beginning of the campaign but by the end of it think, ‘That’s not what I’m in to and it’s outdated, so scrap that.”

The album is a combination of d&b, dubstep and hip, but one aspect that they also focused on was the use of vocals. The reason being: “You can go to a record shop and say, ‘Have you got that song that goes ‘Take me away?’ It’s much easier to invest yourself into a song that’s got something you can remember.”

They decided on using strictly up-and-coming UK vocalists very early on. “We wanted to include UK artists that we were really excited about but weren’t from the d&b scene.”

“We had lots of d&b vocalists approaching us, and as much as we like them, they’d already done a lot of work with other artists.”

To use artists who were not synonymous with that genre was perhaps a bit of a gamble, but Will steps in, “It was exciting to try and do different stuff.”

“With Plan B, he’d never done a d&b track so taking his soulful edge and angle and taking his song writing skills and doing something completely different with him was really exciting for him and for us.”

Their collaboration with Kano, Against All Odds, reached number 45 in the UK charts in early 2009. “We came across the sample and at first, thought about giving it to American people but we thought, let’s see if Kano could do something with it and he loved it.”

With Kano’s new album, Method To The Maadness, featuring a track, Spaceship, produced by Will and Saul, it appears their loyal relationship with the UK scene remains true to this day. It’s a relationship that describe as “that whole UK thing; everyone helping everyone to push it forward.”

“Kano’s been coming to our shows now and he’s been saying he didn’t realise he could be into d&b like he is. Now he’s coming to our shows, dancing around and knows all the songs.”

In May 2009, Chase & Status announced they had signed to the major label, Mercury Records, a move some people interpreted as the duo turning their back on their independent, underground roots.

“It was really important for when we signed a deal with a major, to keep that relationship with the underground and RAM. We had a great thing with RAM Records and we didn’t want to say bye to that. We don’t want to lose our roots and where we come from.”

“It’s a dream deal for us really, we’ve got the funding, press, promotion, photo shoots, and everything’s just done to a new level.”

I ask them, considering their meteoric rise, how do they describe their sound now?

“It’s really UK. We don’t want to be pigeonholed, we make music all across the board and we don’t want to be typecast in d&b or music in general. Everyone always says they find it hard to describe what category we’re in, and we quite like that too. Hopefully we can just write cool music that everyone’s in to.”

By November 2009; they have sold over 60,000 copies of their album, hooked up with Snoop Dogg, remixed for Jay-Z and produced three tracks for Rihanna’s Rated R album.

“We got a MySpace message from Snoop Dogg which said, ‘Yo, this is Snoop, I need a good copy of Eastern Jam, I want to spit some lyrics on it,’ and we thought someone had pranked us.”

After a couple of checks to verify whether it was the real Snoop, the track was completed and revealed to the world within a week. The duo had mixed feelings about the tune dubbed Snoop Doog Millionaire. “It was frustrating because we didn’t get a chance to work with the making of that track, but it was so exciting because off the back of that, it helped our profile in America.”

While working on the dubstep LA mixtape last summer, dubstep producer Plastician predicted the US would embrace the scene once they heard that Snoop had jumped on a dubstep track. He was right, Rihanna deciding she wanted to Chase & Status involved on her album after hearing Saxon.

“Her project is an absolute rollercoaster; she’s got the pick of the best producers in the world.”

Considering the amount of big name producers involved in her project, it is a massive compliment to the boys that Rihanna described their work as being the backbone of her album. Three tracks, Madhouse, Wait Your Turn and G4L made it onto the LP, which has gone on to sell nearly three million copies since its release last November.

“That little quote came about a couple of times. We went out for dinner one night with her, Jay-Z and the whole of the Roc Nation crew. She got a glass and said she wanted to make a toast to us and the fact we were in on the album. We were flattered and speechless.”

A case of bad timing meant they just missed out on any production credits on Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3, but they have now supplied him with two beats for his new project, a move that landed them in a bit of trouble. “One track we gave to Rihanna; we didn’t realise that if you show something to someone at the time, it’s theirs. So we’d already given the track to Jay, not releasing he wanted it, and then showed it to Rihanna, who went crazy about it.”

“It ended up with us getting a little talking to from someone, and Rihanna and Jay-Z having a conversation, with Jay saying, ‘It’s cool, you can have that tune and I’ll get something else off them.”

Not bad to have two of the biggest artists in the world wanting your beat, is it?

In Part Two on Monday, I discuss their future ambitions and what they make of accusations they have ‘sold out’.