The way Liam Ivory breaks things down, there’s no easy answer as to whether Maribou State is more at home on the stage or in the studio. This has everything to do with the background of the Hertfordshire, England, duo, which also includes Chris Davids.

The two producers are making a name for themselves by playing a strain of electronica heavy on enchanted soul vocals and reverb-bathed beats. Reached in his home studio, however, Ivory isn’t about to pretend that laptops and loops were his first musical loves.

“This has really been a musical U-turn for us, because we started playing in bands,” he reveals. “Over here, you either grow up listening to rock music and play in bands or you listen to drum ’n’ bass and dance music. Those two worlds are really separated in England, so it’s either one or the other when you’re growing up.

“We started off playing in alternative bands and never really cared much for dance music or electronic music,” the producer continues. “Then we got a little bit older and our tastes started changing. We started deejaying loads and producing dance tracks. We completely threw away our instruments.”

Along with Davids, Ivory plunged into the world of EDM a half-decade ago, taking an aggressively synthetic approach on early numbers like “Truths” and “Scarlett Groove”. While those initial offerings sounded crafted for big-city superclubs, Maribou State’s new full-length, Portraits, finds the two lifelong friends determined to change things up. You can put folks in front of an Apple, but that’s not going to squash their love of all things live.

“After doing a lot of deejaying , and producing, we decided to move Maribou State back to a live band,” Ivory says. “So the music that we’ve been writing is sort of less club-friendly and more the kind of music that you’d listen to at home.”

That last statement probably needs qualifying. With its gentle washes of soul-sister vocals and chillwave beats, “Home” evokes happy hour at a modern beach villa overlooking an azure sea. If that’s the kind of home where you’re lucky enough to find yourself listening to it, you’ve probably won some version of the charmed-life lottery. Portraits, which blends studio sorcery with live instrumentation, is loaded with such sublimely laid-back moments, from the sun-soaked “Steal” to the synth-washed “The Clown”.

At the same time, Ivory and Davids seem more than up on their ancient EDM history, with the wavering horn line in “Wallflower” and fluttering keys in “Natural Fool” making for what could easily be outtakes from Ninja Tune’s classic new-millennium sampler, Xen Cuts.

Maribou State—which, coincidentally, is signed to Ninja Tune—plans to continue blurring lines, mostly because it seems to be working. So while the duo has received plenty of attention for its original productions and imaginative remix work (check out their down-tempo retooling of Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You”), right now Ivory seems equally excited about revisiting his past.

“We just put on our first live show a couple of weeks ago in London,” he says excitedly. “We had a full live band with us, which was again a big U-turn from the very start. It was like we suddenly ended up in the same place we started, only six or seven years later.”

Maribou State plays a DJ set at Electric Owl on Saturday (April 25).