Album Review: In Waves by Jamie xx

The xx man’s first solo album in nine years arrives straight from the dancefloor, a thrilling celebration of a night out dancing It is a brave artist that takes nine years to follow up their debut album. However in the case of Jamie xx, the time feels right to embark on his second solo musical chapter. Once the fulcrum of The xx, whose subtle and introverted musings crept into the headphones of many, he has been busy establishing himself as a talented multi-genre producer, anchored in house and dance music but with license to roam thanks to a wide range of collaborators.

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At the age of 18, his bare-bones, atmospheric production style helped make the xx's debut a generation-defining album, giving 00s morose teens their own Unknown Pleasures updated for the digital age. In Colour - his first and until now only solo outing - played a similar trick, this time mining more recent eras to create a kaleidoscopic, often overwhelming love letter to rave culture. Both albums have cast a vast shadow over the music that followed them - so it's understandable that In Waves, arriving almost a decade after In Colour, comes burdened with a degree of expectation.

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The UK artist, known equally for his solo efforts as for his contributions as one-third of the xx, delivers a mighty follow-up to 2015's In Colour that will no doubt be rocking clubs well into the new year. Created during the pandemic amid various lockdowns, the album provided the space for Smith to slow down, erase the ennui and find his creative spark again. "It's been a while… and a lot has happened in that time," reads his post from June announcing the album.

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For Jamie xx, In Waves is something of a homecoming. The album can be traced back to his Radio 1 Essential Mix for PPC in April 2020; for him, the opportunity helped him reconnect to his love of creating music. He carried this spirit over the following few years as he tested material across DJ sets, resulting in his first solo album since 2015's landmark In Colour.

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predictably great without full conviction In Waves opens with characteristically lush washing back and forth, building and inhaling until it backspins into a party-ready dance track with suspenseful drums, optimistic refrains, and bittersweet melodic leads. These first two tracks summarize the next ten - it's classic Jamie XX, but several steps farther in the direction of sharing his melancholic bliss with the public, best suited for speakers, rather than In Colour's headphone-engineered personal bubble. It's a natural move, and a smart one - "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" proved his capability, and it makes more sense to focus on actual loud places instead of trying to out-meditate the "Loud Places" he already perfected.

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“Fuck Art, Let’s Dance!” was a slogan found on t-shirts during the 1980s, serving as a credo that sought to liberate music from intellectual pretensions that had grown in certain quarters during the 1970s. Referencing punk, though less bellicose in manner, it called for a back-to-basics approach to return to the original intention of music. Why make music if it didn’t fundamentally move you physically and emotionally? That spirit inhabits In Waves, the long-awaited sophomore release of Jamie xx (James Thomas Smith), also of the feted indie electronic outfit, the xx.

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The challenge in talking about Jamie XX's brilliant new album "In Waves" is trying to describe what "kind" of music it is. As the main songwriter and producer in the British trio the XX, he was the driving force behind one of the great hopes of alternative music in the late '00s. But as that group splintered, he began leaning into his other gig as a DJ and producer, and released the more beat-and-sample-based "In Colour" in 2015.

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‘In Waves’, Jamie xx's long-awaited sophomore album not only lives up to the near-decade-long anticipation but surpasses it, delivering a sublime auditory experience that transcends genres. Whilst a step forward for Jamie, there's one enduring quality simultaneously present on ‘In Waves’, and ‘In Colour’ . Both are albums with tracks that sit perfectly in a multitude of contexts.

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That it has been nearly a decade since solo debut 'In Colour' falsely suggests Jamie xx hasn't kept himself busy. Most recently, of course, he helped out on both xx bandmates' own work, Oliver Sim's 'Hideous Bastard' released in 2022, and last year's 'Mid Air' from Romy. And while, on Jamie's own second full-length 'In Waves', it could be 'Waited All Night' that takes centre stage - featuring both bandmates, taking their vocals and chopping them up, cut-and-paste style, to create a strangely disconcerting mood that's familiar in its sounds yet not in its arrangement - it's actually Robyn's turn that's the cherry on the top of Jamie's late-night cake.

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