“We’ve come out of the darkness”: The xx on their third album ‘I See You’
The xx’s Romy Madley Croft sips on her cup of tea while Oliver Sim is looking a bit sun-kissed after spending maybe a little too much time in the sun at Bronte Beach the day prior, and Jamie xx (full name Jamie Smith) bites his nails. They are a softly spoken trio who are eagerly - albeit a little nervously, they admit - awaiting the release of their third studio album, I See You; their first release in four years. The record represents an evolution for the London-based band, who are coming into their own more now since the release of their first two records (their self-titled debut in 2009 and Coexist followed in 2012). InStyle caught up with Croft, Sim and Smith to find out how they have learned to accept imperfections and how their music has, literally and metaphorically, transitioned from the night and into the day.
InStyle: Tell us a bit about the upcoming record, it’s quite different to Coexist.
Oliver Sim: It is, but it still sounds like us. I think with Coexist, there was a lot of thinking about what makes us sound like us, so let’s hold onto that. This album, I suppose we’ve realised we don’t have to put so much thought into what sounds like us, I think what makes us sound like us is us as people. It’s in the DNA of the band, so we’ve been a lot more open and adventurous with sounds and ideas. Which made it a funner experience, not setting us any limitations.
What had held you back in previous albums?
OS: xx was the first one we’d ever made, there wasn’t much thought really. It was a collection of happy accidents and learning to play our instruments. Then the second time was the first time we’d made a record with an audience. People complimented us on the space and the simplicity of our music, which just wasn’t intentional the first time around. So making Coexist, we put thought into ‘Oh, people like this about us’ and just put what we’d done in the past under a microscope really. I love those [past] records, but my experience is that we were pushing that space in the music even further.
Is it true you make your music at night?
OS: That was very much true with the first record. My take on these albums is that xx is very much the night; that’s when we wrote, when we recorded etc. Coexist was a bit of a shift into dusk or dawn.
Romy Croft: I think dawn.
OS: And then, this album is very much living in the day time. It’s about visibility and openness. And we worked throughout the day for this. I like to say that we’ve come out of the darkness [laughs], and stepped into the light.
Did it bother you that some Reddit user leaked the tracklist a few days before its release?
RC: It was hard for us.
OS: Four days early.
RC: In the grand scheme of things I was ok because I knew we were going to release it that week anyway.
OS: And it wasn’t music.
RC: Yeah. If it had been like, a few months before... I mean, that’s the internet isn’t it? Obviously we send out streams to journalists and we just hope it stays safe.
That must be a real concern then, not just for you but for bands everywhere.
RC: Yeah.
OS: I guess why more people are doing surprise releases, it kinda of cuts that out.
RC: Bjork did it really well. When her album leaked and all of a sudden it went online and it was available, so that was smart. But yeah, fingers crossed it doesn’t happen to us.
Are you perfectionists?
Jamie xx: I think it’s the imperfections and mistakes that make it sound real and honest. Those are the things that happen by mistake. With every record we’re very much perfectionists in terms of working so hard to the point where there’s nothing more we can possibly bring ourselves to do and that’s when we know it’s time to release the album. With this record, we took that even further I think. It took so long. Especially at the end, we spent every day taking everything apart and putting it back together to make sure it was right.
RC: I think with this album more than ever we didn’t let ourselves go back and change things that we did first.
You run the risk of over-thinking it then, right?
RC: Yeah exactly, it’s something in the middle between the first thing being the best thing and leaving it alone is where we landed. We had a lot more time to do that too, so it was all self-discipline. But then again, if we hadn’t had that time to go over it again, the album would be very different.
OS: I think also, we introduced ourselves to letting people in. Sometimes going to someone who isn’t the three of us, you can gain so much perspective, even if they’re not saying anything. You can hear changes you want to make. Stepping back for a week or two always brought an important new discovery.
JXX: That was one thing, we maybe, no, definitely took too much time to make this record because we were all doing our own things and my [solo] tour went on too long. There were lots of factors. But the fact that we didn’t have too much of a deadline and we could take breaks, we could get a lot of perspective in those breaks.
The xx’s highly anticipated third album I See You (Young Turks/Remote Control) comes on Friday January 13.
Published on InStylemag.com.au