The Scandi stars were building separate careers in the US when a friend got them to team up. Now the pair have become an unlikely folk-pop powerhouse

Baba Stiltz and Okay Kaya’s collaboration was like a long-shot blind date, set up by a mutual friend who figured they’d make beautiful music together. Stiltz was an electronic composer and Kaya was a maverick singer-songwriter. Their recording session was almost scuppered when the producer skipped town before they arrived at the studio. But against all odds, the pair’s debut EP, Blurb, is a laconic treat of smart, vulnerable folk-pop in the left-field lineage of the Velvet Underground and Bill Callahan. “We clicked,” grins Kaya Wilkins, AKA Okay Kaya, “like the buckle on a belt.”

They met in Stockholm, at Pitchers, which Stiltz describes as “a weird simulacrum of a British pub, decorated with wallpaper of bookshelves – a very strange, specifically Scandinavian place”. The unlikely duo share the Scandi thing in common – Stiltz grew up in Stockholm and now lives in California, while Wilkins was raised on Nesoddtangen, a remote peninsula outside Oslo, before relocating to New York when she was 19. “I moved from one peninsula to another,” Wilkins says. “New York was extremely different, and I’d desperately wanted it to be different. I’d come from a very small, very homogeneous place, and I wanted to be somewhere exciting and vibrant and diverse all over.”