In the mind of every millennial music fan, there remains a soft spot for the early 2010s, an era marked by a brief but magical convergence of indie pop and electronica – a moment when underground groups like Hot Chip and Crystal Castles hit the mainstream, and artists like Robyn and Frank Ocean were consecrated.
From the vantage point of our increasingly siloed times, the first five years of that decade felt inclusive and boundless: it made perfect sense that Kendrick Lamar would sample a Beach House song, or that Justin Vernon would chop it up in the studio with Kanye West.
In many ways, that short-lived era reached its pinnacle in 2015 with the release of “In Colour,” the debut studio album of Jamie xx, an English musician and DJ who was best known as the producer and beating heart of the massively influential indie pop trio the xx.
Fearlessly crafted out of dozens of generation-spanning samples plucked from dusty record bins around the world, “In Colour” served up a vibrant medley of club-inspired sounds. To this day, the record sounds like nothing else, from the mesmerizing, jungle-influenced slow-burn of the opening track “Gosh,” to the steelpan stickiness of ”I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times),” a wild collaboration with Young Thug and Popcaan that miraculously bridged the gaps between house, dancehall and trap.
At the time, “In Colours” felt very much like a blockbuster album, one that today might be assembled in a major studio by a small army of producers and songwriters. In reality, it was made in “almost total isolation.”
“It came together while I was on the tour bus with (the xx), and in this tiny little studio in my house, which was only big enough for one person,” Jamie xx (real name Jamie Smith) reflects via Zoom, ahead of his two upcoming shows at History in Toronto.
“I was just passionate about the music that had been coming out of London since I was a kid, and was really excited to be a part of it,” he explains. “I definitely over-thought a lot of stuff at the time, which was maddening, but in hindsight, that excitement is what made me feel free.”
This is all very on brand for Smith, 36, a humble, soft-spoken musician who, in the decade since “In Colour,” has largely avoided the spotlight while quietly shaping the sounds of pop and electronic music.
Last September, after years of sharing a slow but steady drip of singles with his ravenous cohort of fans, Smith finally released his sophomore studio album, “In Waves.” The record is an almost perfect distillation of the Jamie xx sound: a vivid, meticulously composed journey into the mind of an obsessive crate-digger, never sacrificing an ounce of musicality as Smith moves seamlessly through house, disco, techno, UK garage and pop.
Featuring contributions from Robyn, the Avalanches, Panda Bear and many more, the record is brilliantly paced, with sudden bursts of rapturous moments of joy punctuating Smith’s expansive soundscapes – be careful if you’re driving while listening to “Life” or “Baddy On The Floor,” songs that feature explosive horn samples that drop into the mix with the approximate impact of a small meteorite.
But there’s also a subtle thread of loneliness, an ambient sense of yearning, that weaves its way through the record, from the melancholy opening piano chords on “Wanna” to the instant “crying-in-the-club” classic “I Waited All Night,” which features panged vocals from Smith’s xx bandmates Romy and Oliver Sim.
“I think that’s probably just rooted in being a sad boy,” Smith tells me, with a slight smirk. “Most of the music that I listen to when I’m not thinking about work is emotional or melancholic in some way. I also think it’s easier to make something that feels like that than something that’s just pure joy.”
That complexity of emotion, I suggest, that slightly dark underbelly, makes his music feel more rooted in reality. After all, a dancefloor is only an escape if there’s something you’re running away from.
“Definitely,” Smith says. “It can be a real juxtaposition of a place.”
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Sitting in a bright hotel room in New York City, Smith comes across as friendly, a bit shy, maybe even a touch awkward. Speaking from beneath a mass of boyish, curly hair, he shares his plans for Toronto as if he’s just another tourist, and not an artist set to play two sold-out shows.
“I always have a great time in Toronto,” he says. “I might actually go a day early to catch a Raptors game with a friend. And I’ve got a few mates there who are in the food industry – there is so much good food there – so I’ll probably just bounce around trying to eat as much as possible.”
He also plans to drop by Cosmos Records on Queen West – “one of the best places to hit” to hit for some new records that he hopes to spin while he’s here.
(Last spring, a day before he performed a sold-out show at CODA in Toronto, Smith showed up to spin some of his newly-purchased vinyl at Little Jerry’s, a tiny wine bar on College Street. Before he hit the decks, he mingled casually with his fans, who did their best to act casual, too.)
In fact, though he’s spent much of the past decade performing on festival stages, Smith seems drawn to smaller spaces. Last spring, he launched a 10-day residency at a 350-capacity club in London, in an attempt to capture “the intimacy, the community, the curation, the sound” of the underground club experience.
“Big shows are great and it’s a different kind of trip, but playing records that I would normally listen to at home is kind of my favourite thing to do,” he says. “And when you’re basically standing next to the audience and you’re all in this tiny room that could be a living room, it’s just a completely different feeling.”
Our conversation takes place as Smith prepares for the North American leg of his massive world tour – a 50-date sprint that kicked off last October in Mexico City, and ends in Paris in March.
Touring on this scale is a draining, disorienting experience, Smith admits, “especially when you’re playing these big shows every day and you’re kind of alone backstage and then suddenly you’re in front of 5,000 people.”
“But the shows have been amazing,” he says. “People seem most excited about hearing the new stuff, which has been a lovely surprise.”
“I’ve been trying to play slightly differently, just trying to cram as much of my own music into it as possible,” he says. “It’s a different way of thinking about things for me. But I’m also trying to re-imagine my own music and rework it so that I can stay interested, while also playing new stuff from other people, too.”
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Born in London, Smith first fell in love with dance music in the early 2000s. “Ibiza house, The Avalanches, Daft Punk – all that stuff that was on MTV and it was like the biggest stuff in the world,” he says.
As a teenager, he attended the Art Putney Academy, also known as the Elliot school, in west London. Though it’s been described as a “modernist monstrosity,” the school must have something special in its water: among its notable alumni from the 21st century are the members of Hot Chip, Kieran Hebden of Four Tet and the mysterious electronica master Burial.
It was there that Smith met Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. In 2006, the three musicians formed the xx, with Romy on vocals and guitar, Oliver on vocals and bass and Smith providing beats and samples on an Akai MPC.
The band’s self-titled debut in 2009 – a moody, atmospheric album, which found unique chemistry between the dreamy voices of Sim and Romy, anchored by Smith’s unconventional percussion approach – was an immediate hit, making the band an overnight success.
“It was so wild,” Smith reflects. “It happened so suddenly that it was hard to really come to grips with it.”
As the xx continued its meteoric rise, Smith began releasing a trickle of blog-igniting remixes – Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” Florence and the Machine’s “You’ve Got The Love.” In 2011, he released “We’re New Here,” a dazzling remix album of Gil Scott-Heron’s final studio album, which combined elements of dubstep and UK garage with the American jazz legend’s gravelly vocals. The project, which inspired Drake and Rihanna’s smash 2011 hit “Take Care,” was a prescient showcase of Smith’s talent as both a producer and musical curator.
But it was “In Colour” that launched Smith’s career into the stratosphere, winning universal acclaim and earning nominations for both the Mercury Prize and the Grammys, while tapping into that complex, overwhelming feeling – that “euphoric melancholy,” as one of Smith’s friends and collaborators recently described it.
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For the next several years, Smith split his time working as a producer, a touring DJ and a member of the xx (the band released “Coexist” in 2015 and “I See You” in 2017).
But when the pandemic arrived, he found himself drawn to the quieter things in life: meditation, long walks, off-the-grid getaways, surfing. It was during this time that he started working on “In Waves.”
As hinted at in the album’s title and artwork, surfing, in particular, was instrumental in providing a new perspective on Smith’s career. Like a surfer losing themselves in the movement of the ocean, he worked to rediscover the natural flow that animated his early days as a producer.
“Whenever I do something with too much intention, it kind of falls flat. What I was trying to do (on this record) was just get to a place where I was enjoying the process of making music again like I was when I was a kid. That meant going back to my roots and sampling records and being at home a bit more and just enjoying myself in the studio rather than thinking about ‘when is this going to come, what is the end game?’”
That doesn’t mean things came easy. It took Smith four years to get “In Waves” to the finish line. “I always feel like everything could be better,” he said in an interview after its release. “I finished it eight times and then there was always this bit in me that felt like it could be one better.”
“In Waves,” like “In Colour,” was crafted mostly in isolation, but brims with a sweeping, communal energy.
Much of this energy is achieved through the use of the human voice. Unlike his peers, some of whom sing on their own songs (Caribou, Hot Chip), and some of whom rely on heavily processed vocal loops (Four Tet, Burial), Jamie xx songs overflow with a multitude of competing, interlaced voices; words and melodies that drape the music in an iridescent tapestry of sound and emotion.
Take, for example, standout track “Dafodil,” which features the voices of Kelsey Lu, John Glacier and and Panda Bear, plus samples of A$AP Rocky, J.J. Barnes and Astrud Gilberto. Or the ecstatic “Life,” a track built around bubbly vocals from Sweden’s reigning pop queen.
“I tried loads of different ideas for vocals because I knew that song needed one,” Smith recalls. “Romy tried some stuff and it didn’t quite land, and I tried a bunch of different stuff, but it still felt a bit too sample heavy. So I texted Robyn and she texted it back within the same day, and it was just perfect.”
On “All You Children,” Smith samples an uplifting snippet of poetry from Nikki Giovanni, a beloved poet and star of the Black Arts Movement, who died a few weeks ago. It’s a sample he’s held on to since he discovered it some 15 years ago at a record shop in Washington, D.C.
“It’s always been in the back of my mind,” he tells me. “It was quite a special thing, and I didn’t want to get wrong. So when I had the chance to do it with The Avalanches, who are one of my biggest inspirations, everything just clicked.”
The album’s finale, “Falling Together,” features a powerful monologue from Oona Doherty, a Northern Irish dancer and choreographer whose existential words Smith transforms into an uplifting moment of freedom.
“It just feels like an extra layer of connection,” Smith says of these spoken word samples. “I wanted to be able to have a bit more of a dialogue with the audience when I’m playing.”
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As our conversation comes to a close, it becomes clear that Smith is most animated and comfortable when talking about music discovery – finding rare records and sharing them with an audience, no matter the size.
During the fall leg of his tour, he spent an extra five days in Brazil, hitting up record shops and driving around in taxis. “The music that’s on the radio there is so interesting and spacious and kind of avant garde,” he says. In Tokyo, he purchased a boat load of rare groove records from the ‘60s and ‘70s. He tells me he fell in love with a 1973 track by the soul singer Lyn Christopher called “Take Me With You.”
Looking ahead to 2025, he hopes to stay engaged while on tour, meeting locals and digging into regional music scenes. But the future is up in the air.
“I’d been quite nervous about how long (‘In Waves’) had taken,” he admits. “When it finally happened, it felt so good. I worked so hard on it and had the feeling that I couldn’t have possibly done any more. But now I am thinking about what I’m going to do next. And that’s a whole other head f–k.”
Inevitably, I ask about the xx, which hasn’t released an album in eight years. He confirms that the band is back in the studio working on their fourth album. Why does it feel important to return to the studio as a trio, I ask, given the different directions each musician has taken in recent years?
“Because that’s our origin,” he responds, without hesitation. “I can’t imagine not doing that. And even if it is difficult to get back together because we’re all doing our own things, and we all have our own lives – that’s normal for friends growing into their 30s – I think all of that stuff is only going to make the music better in the end.”
It’s been nearly 20 years since the xx formed, I point out, far longer than most bands last. I wonder if he’d offer any advice to that younger version of himself.
“I would just say enjoy it, because there were a lot of times when we were all just so overwhelmed and exhausted that it was difficult. But at least we had each other. But yeah, I could have been a little bit more sort of happy-go-lucky with it all.”
That’s the tough part about being a sad boy, I suppose.
“Yeah,” he responds with a laugh.
