Anti Up is the house-music project formed by Chris Lake and Chris Lorenzo in 2018. It grew out of years of collaborations between the two British producers, but Anti Up is not simply a name for every Lake/Lorenzo back-to-back set. The project has its own records, visual identity and live show, culminating in the 15-track debut album What Is Life in 2024.
That distinction also separates Anti Up from Under Construction, Chris Lake’s live project with FISHER. Anti Up is Lake and Lorenzo writing and performing as a duo with a shared musical identity. Under Construction is built around Lake and FISHER’s B2B chemistry and event format. They belong to different creative relationships.
THE COLLABORATION STARTED BEFORE THE NAME
Lake and Lorenzo had been making music together before Anti Up existed. Their 2015 collaboration “Piano Hand” was premiered by Annie Mac on BBC Radio 1. Chris Lake’s own SoundCloud upload from May 2015 describes the track as a collaboration with Lorenzo and emphasizes the speed-garage influence in the record.
Mixmag later traced the path from “Piano Hand” through other joint records including “Wicked Games,” “The Calling” and the 2017 “Nothing Better.” By that point, the pair had enough history that the new project was not an industry-arranged superduo. It was formalizing a studio relationship that already worked.
The reason that matters is audible. Lorenzo’s background in UK bass, garage and house pushes differently against Lake’s production instincts than a conventional feature does. The two had already learned how to make records together before they had to decide what Anti Up should sound like.
ANTI UP FORMALLY ARRIVED AT EDC LAS VEGAS IN 2018
Anti Up officially launched in 2018. Mixmag’s May 24 report documented the project immediately after its debut performance during EDC Las Vegas’ opening ceremony, and EDC’s own archived 2018 lineup confirms a Chris Lake B2B Chris Lorenzo appearance on the Friday program.
That live debut was followed quickly by recorded material. The duo released “Pizza” and then the three-track Hey Pablo EP in November 2018. Mixmag reported that Hey Pablo was the inaugural release on their Up The Anti Records imprint.
The tone was intentionally less self-serious than the scale of the two names involved. Even the duo’s explanation of the EP focused on the cold Birmingham weather during the sessions rather than a grand mission statement. That irreverence would remain part of the project’s personality.
ANTI UP IS NOT JUST CHRIS LAKE PLUS CHRIS LORENZO
The useful way to think about a side project is to ask whether it creates permission that the solo artists do not have. Anti Up does. The music can lean harder into acid, techno, UK-rave references, industrial textures, strange samples and punk-like abrasion without requiring either producer to make that sound the center of a solo catalog.
That does not mean every Anti Up record sits outside house music. Apple Music classifies the project broadly as Dance and describes its sound as combining acid-house rawness with festival-ready tech-house production. The important difference is aesthetic freedom rather than a clean genre border.
Lake has repeatedly described making music with friends as one of the ways he keeps the process fun. His 2026 MusicTech interview points to Chris Lorenzo as one of the regular collaborators in Lake’s long studio-session videos. Anti Up is the most formal version of that relationship: the experiments are not being filtered back into a Chris Lake single or a Chris Lorenzo single.
THE PROJECT COULD DISAPPEAR FOR LONG STRETCHES
Anti Up never operated like a conventional album-cycle act. Releases arrived in bursts, then stopped. Beatportal noted that after “Chromatic” reached the top of Beatport’s overall chart in May 2022, the duo went nearly two years without new Anti Up music.
The gap was not inactivity. Ahead of Coachella 2024, Lake said the pair had been working on an album “for literally years” and called it “a pure passion project through and through.” That is a useful description of why the release schedule could be sparse: Anti Up only had to move when the project itself had something worth releasing.
COACHELLA 2024 WAS THE PUBLIC RE-ENTRY
Anti Up returned to the stage at Coachella in April 2024, playing both weekends and closing the Mojave tent on Friday. Contemporary coverage described the shows as loaded with unreleased music and new stage production. The pair had already confirmed the album was complete before the festival.
The Coachella sets matter because they re-established Anti Up as a distinct live act rather than a Lake/Lorenzo B2B. Reviews from the period explicitly noted that the two concepts are not interchangeable. An Anti Up show is designed around Anti Up records, the duo’s shared presentation and a catalog that can be much stranger than the most recognizable solo hits.
That separation is important for search accuracy. A festival billing that says “Chris Lake B2B Chris Lorenzo” is evidence of the two artists playing together. It should not automatically be relabeled Anti Up unless the event itself bills the project that way.
WHAT IS LIFE TURNED YEARS OF IDS INTO AN ALBUM
What Is Life was released October 11, 2024 through Big Beat Records/Atlantic. Apple Music lists 15 tracks and just over an hour of music. It was Anti Up’s first full-length album, six years after the project’s formal debut.
The record widens the project beyond one branch of house. Its material moves through acid and tech-house pressure, techno, breakbeat, drum-and-bass influence, distorted vocals, guitar and punk/rave references. Apple’s album notes describe the record as written for dark rooms and shaped by the underground clubs and sounds that Lake and Lorenzo grew up around.
That origin gives the album a different logic from Lake’s Chemistry. Chemistry is a Chris Lake artist album built around collaboration and a wider emotional/musical palette. What Is Life is a Lake/Lorenzo duo record whose identity depends on both producers being able to leave their solo expectations outside the room.
KEY ANTI UP RECORDS
“Pizza” and the Hey Pablo EP establish the early project. “Something’s About To Go Down” and “Chromatic” document the years before the album. “Control The Media” and “The Weekend” reopened the project ahead of Coachella 2024. On What Is Life, the title track, “Revolution,” “Outlaws,” “Freaky Feed Me,” “Do You Know Where Your Children Are” and “Holding On” demonstrate how wide the shared vocabulary had become.
The point is not to turn those tracks into another ranked list. Anti Up makes more sense as a project whose catalog records the space between two producers. Some tracks lean toward Lake’s economy and low-end control; some toward Lorenzo’s UK-bass and rave instincts; the strongest ones stop making the division easy to hear.
ANTI UP AFTER THE ALBUM
The project continued after What Is Life. Apple Music lists new Anti Up singles including “Maximum” and “I Cannot” in 2025. Both also appeared in Chris Lake’s official 2025 full-set uploads, showing that Anti Up material could move back into his solo DJ sets without turning those performances into Anti Up shows.
That is the cleanest way to understand the relationship. Anti Up expands Chris Lake’s creative world, but it does not replace his solo catalog, Black Book Records, or Under Construction. It is the place where Lake and Chris Lorenzo can make a third thing—recognizably connected to both of them, but accountable to neither solo brand.