Mermaid (Brittany Campbell and Candace Quarrels), courtesy Alexa Viscius.

Brittany Campbell and Candace Quarrels, who perform as duo Mermaid, just released a debut album, Iridescence, last month and new single “Dissociate” last week. They’re also a couple and have one of the best meet-cutes ever. The two met while working in the Chicago cast of “Hamilton,” playing the Schuyler sisters. While their voices blended well when they sang together, they didn’t actually speak to each other for the first three months of their time in the show.

The ice finally broke at a cast member’s farewell party. Then they became friends.

“Our friendship was so intertwined with music,” Quarrels said in a recent call. “I was singing background vocals for Britt’s music, and that just sort of spiraled into her sending me tracks that she was working on and saying … ‘try to write some lyrics to it and let’s see if we can record it!’”

Campbell was already making music and had a publishing deal. Quarrels, a self-declared musical theater nerd, said she’s learned a lot about the industry from Campbell.

The friendship started progressing. But back then neither identified as queer, so when the questions started coming about their relationship, they brushed them off.

“It was a friendship spectrum,” Campbell said, hedging. “It got to a place, especially in the theater, where we were just flirting incessantly.”

They went on a writing retreat, the result of which was “Find Me.”

“It was this declaration of love, that said all the things that we hadn’t said to each other yet,” Quarrels said.

It took another two weeks for them to get the gumption up to talk about their feelings for each other. After that, they said, their feelings were too intense for only a friendship and a musical partnership. They were ready to investigate the romantic possibilities.

So first, the band, then the romance. Then they moved in and lived together for the remainder of their time in “Hamilton” in Chicago. When that gig ended, they moved to Los Angeles to make music as Mermaid.

The two gigged around town before the pandemic hit, which put a lot of things on pause.

The silver lining, Quarrels said, was that Mermaid had the space to find its sound. The duo also connected with producer Sam Hoffman, whose work with Mereba they admired. Campbell said Hoffman has basically become their third member. He helped Mermaid create an album full of the music the two love; hip-hop, soul, pop and alt-rock.

“Coming straight from ‘Hamilton,’ I had never been a recording artist like Britt,” she said. “My whole life has been Broadway and theater. It allowed me time and space to figure out how to write a verse.”

Added Campbell: “I feel like something that we really tapped into, while diving into so many different genres, is that no matter what it is we’re playing, we sound like Mermaid.”

Mermaid starts some songs with Campbell humming a melody and Quarrels to write lyrics to it. But their newest single, December’s “Dissociate,” has its origins in the former gifting the latter a new drum kit for Christmas one year.

“One day, I was just in there, just banging on the drums and playing this kind of surf beat, and Candace started humming a melody that becomes the ‘Dissociate’ chorus. And the rest just flowed from there; a Le Tigre ‘Deceptacon’ kind of thing.”

One of Mermaid’s main goals is to speak to as many people possible and to bring them into the same shared space.

“You’ll find us at a rocker dive bar one day, a biker strip club the next day, and then at the juice joint,” Campbell said. “We feel as if we belong everywhere. So, our music can belong everywhere, too. There’s more connectivity than people think between genres. And there’s definitely a way to bridge the gap. And that’s how I think things become the most powerful.”

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.