There’s no bad time for good advice. Earlier this year, Jamie Smith – better known as Jamie xx, of the Mercury Prize-winning group The xx – thought his second solo album, In Waves, was done and dusted. Then he had a conversation that changed its course. It was with the Swedish singer Robyn, as they worked on Life, a track intended to be a standalone single after the album had done its job. The collaboration proved taxing in the finishing stages, but then came the pep talk Jamie needed.
“I always thought making music should be fun, because so much of it is,” he says from his London home. “But Robyn pointed out that the bit where you have to grind: that’s the bit that makes the piece of music good. And that changed my mindset.” So when the test pressing for In Waves came back, in readiness for a pre-summer release, he slammed on the brakes, found space for the finally completed Life, and revisited the other tracks to shine them up another notch.
“Going back to it again definitely made it better,” says the 35-year-old. “I’ve always had that mentality that something can always be improved – which isn’t satisfying, but it does make for good art.”
The album’s delay meant he spent his summer sets at Coachella, Glastonbury and Pacha, in Ibiza, teasing the album rather than promoting it – though perhaps it was fortuitous that In Waves didn’t get swallowed up as part of our Charli XCX-induced Brat summer. To these ears, nothing can quite prepare listeners for the masterful tapestry of melodies, moods, ideas and stone-cold bangers that glide us from one room to the other at the warehouse party of our dreams. This is when you’d wonder what defines the line between side projects and main projects, especially given the recent solo successes of xx bandmates Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim (who, once again, both feature on Jamie’s album, appearing on the uptempo Waited All Night).
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Work on In Waves began in 2019, soon after touring for The xx’s album I See You ended. Maximalist in comparison, it’s crammed with samples, in part because Jamie only had his vinyl collection for musical stimulus during lockdown. For starters, Daffodil is based on I Just Make Believe (I’m Touching You), by the late R&B star JJ Barnes, and Treat Each Other Right spins from Oh My Love, by Almeta Lattimore. “I was listening mostly to songs from the 1960s and 1970s because it was the music that made me think the least about having to finish an album,” he says. As soon as he was able, he was out testing it at club nights and festivals, which makes In Waves “more external and outward” than his first solo album, the Mercury-, Brit- and Grammy-nominated In Colour, from 2015.
“Starting it during the pandemic was quite inward, but a lot of the ideas for the structures of the tracks came from playing them and watching crowds, and changing the tracks slightly every time. It has definitely ended up sounding more like one of my DJ sets.”
The last song, Falling Together, features the spoken word of the Belfast choreographer and dancer Oona Doherty, a long-time collaborator. Jamie shortened a 25-minute-long voice note Doherty left him to layer on top of a song he couldn’t quite finish. “It was quite an emotional moment when that all clicked, which is why it’s called Falling Together.”
The first time we met was back in 2009, when The xx were in Dingle for Other Voices, at the very start of their career. The rabbit-in-the-headlights looks from the young band reflected the speed with which they’d been catapulted from the solitude of their bedrooms. “Everything I was doing at that point in my life felt surreal,” he says. “Everything was too fast to take on board, and everything was very exciting and overwhelming.”
With hindsight, was there anything he could have done to make that incline more manageable?
“Probably not as a 20-year-old,” he says. “The younger generation seemed to be more understanding of their own selves. It took me until the pandemic to learn about self-preservation.” A case in point: when we first start arranging a chat, just a few weeks before the album’s release, our plans are paused because he’s gone Awol. In turns out he and a friend have taken time out to visit rural Norway. “You have to get a boat over a lake to get to the house, so you’re really in the middle of nowhere. There’s no phone signal. I didn’t take anything that I could use that has a screen. We had to fish for our dinner every night, and cook it on a fire that we made outside.”
For fans of the London trio’s sparse electro sounds, it’s encouraging to hear that, for Jamie, his next phase involves not only tour dates for 2025 but also regrouping with The xx. After Jamie received instant spin-off success with We’re Here Now, his remix album with Gil Scott-Heron, and with In Colour, it wasn’t guaranteed the group would continue. And now, with each member having struck out on their own successfully, the dynamic is further complicated.
“I’ve really enjoyed going into the studio again, but I think Ollie and Romy have found that more difficult, because they were loving having complete creative control. We’ve only just had a good conversation about how we deal with that,” he says. “It was nice to hear it from them, because they finally felt like they understood where I was at when I did my tours and albums.
“Now they see how hard it is, and I feel like I can teach them a little about how to spend their energy in terms of making music together and doing our own stuff, whereas they’ve always been the teachers in this relationship. I’m encouraging them that we should just be making music. It can be for us, or it can be for one of us, or it can be for somebody else, or it can just be rubbish, but it’s just nice that we’re making music.”
In Waves is released via Young on Friday, September 20th
