This article was originally published on August 27, 2024, as part of our Fall Preview. Jamie xx’s latest album, In Waves, was released on September 20, 2024.
On an early evening in May, at a small gathering in an industrial area of South London, Jamie xx looked like a child at someone’s 70th-birthday party. As a cadre of industry figures, artists, and model types danced under red lights, Jamie drifted around the edges in an understated blue pinstripe shirt and Supreme jeans, occasionally saying a word or two to another wallflower. Never mind that it was his music booming out of the speakers or the fact that the crowd had gathered to celebrate him at a venue he himself had built. Jamie, 35, came across more like an audio engineer, attentively checking the mix from different points in the room, than the guest of honor.
The event was taking place on the miniscule dance floor of the Floor, a pop-up club Jamie had created inside the trendy Bermondsey venue MOT, where everyone had assembled to listen to the producer’s second album, In Waves. It had been nine years since the release of his culture-shifting debut album In Colour; this friends-and-family party represented a sigh of relief that Jamie was reemerging into the spotlight. When he first began releasing music as Jamie xx, in 2010, dance music was still a largely niche concern. The other big dance breakouts then were either purposefully alienating producers like James Blake or EDM-adjacent acts such as Skrillex and Diplo, whose crossover pop hits were willfully bro-focused. Tying together threads of classic British styles that included rave and garage and coating them in a nostalgic, melancholy gloss, In Colour became something like Moby’s Play for the 2010s indie set: the only electronic album in your ex’s record collection, with a sound that felt both legitimately in tune with dance music’s past and pop-focused enough to avoid the heads-only feeling of so many other lauded records of the time.
In Colour was the kind of big arrival that would usually warrant a quick follow-up, but aside from a handful of one-off singles, Jamie’s solo project mostly lay dormant over the past decade. He had hardly been absent; in the interim, he played a steady stream of increasingly huge DJ sets — ranging from headline gigs at tastemaker festivals like C2C to crowd-pleasing showings at Coachella — dropped the aforementioned solo tracks, and released and toured 2017’s I See You, his third album with the xx, the electronic-pop band with which he became famous.
But anticipation for a follow-up to In Colour had been mounting since it was released. Unlike so many artists who work slowly, Jamie had been tight-lipped about when it might arrive, characteristically letting the music, and the people in his orbit, speak for him. The title of one song, “Idontknow,†released in 2020 after a five-year silence, pointed to possible writer’s block; 2022’s “Let’s Do It Again†spoke to both a return to live music after the pandemic and, in terms of his own output, the beginning of a steady stream of new singles. In 2020, Matthew Thornhill, managing director of his label Young, said a new record was in progress without revealing how far along it was or what it might sound like; in January 2023, nearly two years before the album’s eventual release date, Jamie said he was “finishing mixing.†All the while, Reddit pages and Stereogum comment threads pondered over what, exactly, had been taking him so long.
The In Waves celebration at the Floor marked the official prelude to the rollout of the new album, with Jamie easing into a summer-long promotional cycle. The project would be formally announced in just over a week, with a September 20 release date. Things were moving quickly, but it had taken him a long time to get to that point. Over the past decade, Jamie had essentially been dealing with a crisis of faith in both his personal life and the career he had thrown himself into as a teenager. “I don’t remember anything pretty much from when I was 18 until I was 30,†he told me. “It’s all just a blur of being in a different city every day.†In order to get into the headspace to release a new album, he had to be sure he wouldn’t just let everything slip by.
The Floor was designed to be the club of Jamie’s dreams: a renovated space with state-of-the-art equipment, each night featuring sets from all his friends and heroes — including his bandmate Romy Madley Croft, Swedish house DJ Axel Boman, and pop “It†couple Charli XCX and the 1975’s George Daniel.
Earlier in the week, at his immaculate, light-filled studio in Soho, Jamie told me that he’d been thinking about something like this for a long time. “I wanted, for years and years, to build my own club without thinking about the consequences of what it’d do to my life,†he says. The Floor is an attempt to pay tribute to clubs he loved in his teens and early 20s, like the legendary Shoreditch spot Plastic People, which closed in 2015.
But the Floor also has a secondary, more complicated function: penance. Jamie’s career began when, as a shy, black-clad 17-year-old skater from South London named Jamie Smith, he signed to lauded indie label XL Recordings as part of the xx with his childhood best friends Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. Their 2009 self-titled debut was an instant sensation, reaching No. 3 on the U.K. album chart and turning the three impossibly quiet kids into indie heroes. While Madley Croft and Sim took time off between records, Jamie kept working, remixing albums by Gil Scott-Heron, producing for Drake, and quickly becoming the group’s first breakout star.
In Colour was born out of the homesickness Jamie felt while on tour with the xx and was designed to be an homage to the city and sounds that had raised him. “I just like the lineage and the heritage and the fact that British dance music is still progressing,†he told the Guardian at the time. “I’m from London, I love London, and I wouldn’t know how else to show that love in musical terms.†It may have had casual beginnings — an ulterior motive for making an album, expressed in that same Guardian interview, was that it forced him to finish many of the tracks on his hard drive — but the praise for In Colour was anything but. Pitchfork said it was 0.7 points away from perfection; The New Yorker prophesied him as “a young man on the verge of having everything he wants.†Lindsay Zoladz, Vulture’s music critic at the time, called it the second-best album of the year.
But it also became the target of vitriol from gatekeeper dance-music publications like Resident Advisor and the Quietus, which characterized Jamie as a posh kid gentrifying the sounds of the underground with a tasteful take on rave and house. The Quietus called In Colour “sexless [and] sonically conservative†and suggested Jamie’s avowed love of Plastic People was “mere marketing fodderâ€; RA said he “seems content to slip out a stream of clichés and call it a day.â€
Jamie brushed off that criticism privately at the time, but in the years since, as minimalist house tracks by nostalgia-baiting artists like Ross From Friends and rare groove records, like the omnipresent ’80s afro-boogie track “Only You,†became the de facto sound of trendy, corporate young London, he began to feel like he had wronged the culture that he loved. Dance music, especially the cool dance music that lurks in the kind of London clubs Jamie went to growing up, is insular and relentlessly gatekept by DJs desperate to keep their most niche, un-Shazamable finds to themselves, qualities Jamie was well aware of when he started releasing dance music himself. It’s not a culture that looks kindly on flaneurs — especially those who have already gone platinum with their electronic-pop band — and by releasing a broadly accessible take on that culture, Jamie was essentially inviting a whole lot of people into a club that was small by design.
“When I was a kid, underground dance music was the coolest thing in the world, and now it’s basically the most popular thing in the world,†he says. “Some people think it’s cool — kids — but there’s a lot of them, and it doesn’t feel like it’s mine. I struggled with that, and I also struggled with the fact that I felt like I had something to do with it.â€
In Colour’s detractors got one thing right: It was dance music that could be enjoyed by a lot of people in a lot of contexts. After its success, so-called “tasteful†dance music slowly began to creep toward the top of festival lineups in the form of artists like Peggy Gou and Fred again.. — artists who may not have been directly inspired by Jamie, but who definitely toppled through the floodgates In Colour helped to open. Jamie is often lumped in with these musicians, and although he can definitely hear his influence in Fred’s music, he sees himself as a bit removed in age and intention. “They’re very good at what they do — some of it I like more than others. I’m just not really that into pop music, never have been,†he says. Sessions with big pop artists have left him cold in the past, which is why he’s moved away from that world in recent years. “It does feel a bit soulless while I’m doing it. Whenever I leave the studio from a session like that, I’m so grateful I can go and make music on my own.â€
Meanwhile, Jamie’s newfound status as a dance-music wunderkind — and the constant merry-go-round of DJ sets and tours that comes alongside it — had left him burnt out. When he turned 30, in 2018, he had what he called “a little crisis,†though it sounds like a much larger one: The excitement of making music had begun to dim, and he felt deep anxiety about continuing with his chosen vocation. “The reward of music started to wane a little bit, and I hated that — but I couldn’t do anything else, so I just had to find a more sustainable way to keep going,†he says.
He put everything on pause, broke up with his girlfriend, and traveled to India by himself to “do the classic thing†of getting back in touch with himself. While he was there, and for a couple of weeks after, he was “very calm,†but the feeling didn’t last. “It’s not everyday life just wandering around the beaches and the mountains,†he says. Two years later, after moving home and centering music in his life again, he felt despondency creep in again, realizing he “didn’t have any way of living that wasn’t based around music and touring.â€
The people closest to him, like Sim and Madley Croft, saw it too. “Between every record, Romy and I have taken a break to settle into normal life back at home — Jamie hasn’t taken any of those breaks,†Sim says. “Until COVID lockdown, he hadn’t really stopped since he was 19, and I think he found it quite self-effacing — like, I am now an adult in my 30s; who am I if I’m not the guy that’s constantly on the road?â€
Throughout our conversation, Jamie returned again and again to the idea of “being present†in his own life in order to not wake up in 12 years and realize he once again doesn’t remember anything. Eventually, as he began to invest in a more regimented lifestyle, music started to become more fun, less of a job, and he was finally in the right mindset to start work on what would become In Waves.
Jamie is well aware of how clichéd his journey sounds: He began eating better, took a course in transcendental meditation, and started doing a YouTube yoga series called “Boho Beautiful.†In Waves tries to capture both his embrace and his awareness of the cliché through the use of slogan-y vocal samples, inspired by those used in Detroit and Chicago house music, of people saying things like “All we gotta do is treat each other right†and “It’s a good feeling; it’s an honest feeling.†As if to avoid the glazed-over, dentist-waiting-room feeling of the trendy contemporary dance music embodied by Spotify’s “Sunday Sessions†playlist, In Waves doesn’t have the washed-out haze you might associate with Jamie’s music. Instead, it’s a record of robust house, techno, disco, and alt-pop that’s designed to flow like one of his DJ sets and that moves away from the ’90s-fetishist tenor of In Colour. Some songs, like the Robyn-featuring ballroom tribute “Life,†seem purpose-built to soundtrack Pride parties in the dog days of summer. There are also concessions to the modern dance-pop landscape: “Waited All Night,†a collaboration with Romy and Oliver, feels like Jamie’s take on “It Goes Like (Na Na Na),†Gou’s inescapable 2023 dance hit that, depending on who you ask, either made last summer worth living or single-handedly killed the vibe at every bar in East London.
Jamie says his use of capital-G Good Vibes samples can be taken as seriously or as ironically as you wish. “It’s meant to be fun and poking fun at the fact that we’re all going through this,†he says. “We’re trying so hard and thinking so much about making ourselves better, and it’s fucking boring to do that all the time.†The vast majority of these samples are also, as on In Colour, of legacy Black artists and vocalists like soul singer Almeta Lattimore and famed poet and Black Arts Movement lynchpin Nikki Giovanni. In the years since In Colour, conversations around the ways in which white DJs use Black voices, and the ethics of it, have only intensified, which Jamie says he’s keenly aware of. “I really thought about it for a while, especially in the pandemic, and I was, like, kind of amazed at how ignorant I was,†he says. At the same time, that moment of consideration didn’t affect the way Jamie writes music, simply because he feels that producers should be allowed to sample and reuse as they please. “I always listened to soul when I was a baby. That being the basis for music I wanted to make, I never thought twice about it, and maybe I should have.â€
“I’ve always tried to pay everybody who I’m using the right amount of money, and tried to make sure it’s what the artist wants as well, and hopefully benefit out of it,†he continues. “But music is above all of that — it should be about sharing. It was like that in the ’60s with rock and roll, and that was, like, the biggest genre of all time.â€
It was this spirit, rather than one of opportunism or whimsy, that first made Jamie want to make a record like In Colour, a tribute to the dance music that he loved, and it’s this spirit that made him want to host the Floor. It’s Plastic People for the kids who never got to experience it — who have only ever been to corporate clubs where the music is just generic Instagram Story fodder. “The reason why I wanted to do the Floor was to be the anti all of that, and for it to just be a dark room where people don’t even want to take pictures because you look crap. It’s just about the vibe and the sound. It’s combating those weird feelings I have about the way dance music is now by doing something positive.â€
The Floor set after Jamie’s In Waves celebration in London is a marathon: Around midnight, he takes to the booth for what will end up being a nearly six-hour performance, pulling out records and mixing them with tracks from friends and songs from his new album as he puffs on a watermelon-ice-flavored vape. Jamie still doesn’t necessarily look like the guest of honor or the superstar DJ. But maybe that’s the point of In Waves: to get him away from the hype and the next-big-thing tags and back to what he loved about dance music to begin with — its electrifying, unifying thrills. “It’s funny: For a man who doesn’t say much, Jamie does have a loud impact,†Sim tells me. “If he’s not going to be the loudest personality in the room, his contribution is going to be the music he makes. That’s how he brings people together.â€