Jamie xx: wave after wave

Towards the end of the summer of 2020, the UK was in somewhat of a nether zone. The first peak of the Covid pandemic had passed and the long and languid final days of summer brought with them a restlessness and a desire to connect once more, despite government advice to continue to isolate. During this period, illegal rave culture returned to both London and the rest of the country, spawning a morally dubious but undoubtedly exciting underground movement.

Each weekend during this time, Jamie Smith would cycle down the River Thames and pop his head into whichever mini raves he stumbled upon. Barges, riverbanks, marshes, forests and more all hosted ramshackle events after six months of total seclusion, bringing little sparks of life back to a numb and frazzled youth. “Those things have happened before, but it hadn’t felt like such a scene,” Smith — who has become one of the defining British dance producers of the 21st century as Jamie xx — tells Rolling Stone UK from his Soho studio, a stone’s throw away from the site of these parties four years ago. “It was really special to see human beings really wanting to be around each other again.” The music was “mostly terrible,” he laughs, “but it was a lovely, heartwarming, inspiring thing to be around.”

Though you would ordinarily expect a pandemic to stifle the creativity and spark of a dance producer and DJ, Covid provided the jolt Smith needed to re-engage with his love of music and escape a rut that had plagued him for the previous few years. After he returned home from the tour behind The xx’s third album, 2017’s I See You, Smith believed he had his second solo album all mapped out. “I made loads of music of what I thought I wanted [the album] to be like and it was just really boring,” he reflects. “I liked it, but it didn’t seem like there was any reason for other people to hear it. It took me a while after that to figure out where to go next.”

This process of rediscovery began in earnest when he was asked to curate an Essential Mix for the BBC Radio 1 show of the same name during the first weeks of the pandemic. His production of the lauded two-hour show features old favourites (Fela Kuti, The Avalanches) and new titans of UK electronic music (Jockstrap, Kelly Lee Owens, Two Shell), as well as embryonic versions of tracks that would eventually end up on Smith’s staggering new album, In Waves.

“It felt like radio was suddenly as important again as it used to be,” he remembers. “People were watching streamed DJ sets on the weekend and in the same place and condition. The opportunity to have an audience like that for a radio show felt very unique, and I had enough headspace to be able to reflect on everything and be calm. I was excited to make music again.”

Every second of In Waves is imbued with this new sense of giddy excitement and creativity. A darker and more intense listen than In Colour, the album pulsates with this craving for reconnection, as if Smith knew just how divine it would sound on the world’s return to clubbing. On ‘Treat Each Other Right’, he samples Almeta Lattimore’s 1975 soul track ‘Oh My Love’ and sends it on a path towards dancefloor euphoria. As if showing the listener his working, halfway through the track he drops out his chugging bassline and lets the original stand alone, before plunging you back into the delirium.

Smith says, “When the pandemic happened, I was struggling to listen to modern music, especially modern dance music, because it was making me think about all the work I wasn’t doing right, and the album that I wasn’t finishing. So I just listened to old records and my parents’ records and soul music and jazz, and started making music like I did when I was a kid, which was sampling my parents’ records.”

Elsewhere, the raucous ‘Breather’ samples a yoga instructor who Jamie and his upstairs neighbour would practise with each morning during the pandemic on YouTube. “I was listening to it every day and thinking about how it could translate from being about being healthy to about… well, being healthy in another way,” he laughs, fully aware of the hedonistic nights out it’s sure to soundtrack this year.

The album ends with ‘Falling Together’, the peak of its unburdened euphoria. The song — a trance-like avalanche of piercing synths — is led by the vocals of Irish dancer Oona Doherty, who directed Jamie xx’s video for ‘Idontknow’ in 2020. In the song — a sample from a much larger dance piece that Smith has soundtracked — Doherty immaculately narrates a dancer through various states of dancefloor transcendence while Smith provides a suitably grand soundtrack. “Nothing to do but to treat and be treated with kindness / To preserve one another,” she sings over bubbling synths. “I didn’t think I would close the album with it, because I didn’t want to end on such a sincere note,” Smith says, but the advice of friends led him to change his tune and give In Waves the ecstatic ending it deserves.

While In Waves sits in the darker corners of Jamie xx’s discography, its singles ‘Baddy on the Floor’ and ‘Life’, featuring Honey Dijon and Robyn respectively, are the kinds of sunny festival anthems he’s mastered over and over. The former is pure jubilation in musical form with a drop full of ecstatic horns, while ‘Life’ sees Robyn giddily discussing a new love (“You’re giving me walk of shame / You’re giving me strong torso!” she giggles) on a life-affirming dance hit.

Attend any of Jamie xx’s DJ sets between the end of the pandemic and the start of 2024, and you’d have heard songs that have ended up on In Waves in various states of completion. The producer explains that if you play an unmastered new track among a DJ set and it doesn’t lead to “deflation” among the crowd despite its inferior audio quality, you’re onto a winner. “It’s quite a harsh test, but very useful,” he says.

The final version of In Waves, he says, was heavily informed by the music he was listening to and playing out to crowds in this time. “I was listening to lots of new UK break-y stuff and it all sounded so cool. I didn’t know how they were making it, so I was trying to emulate that stuff. I thought I’d finished the album, and then heard all this stuff and thought, ‘I’ve got to try and make something that sounds like that!’”

“I made loads of music of what I thought I wanted [the album] to be like and it was just really boring”

Smith estimates that he “finished” In Waves eight times, always being struck by an extra wave of creativity and continuing to tweak. Singles released since the pandemic — ‘Idontknow’, ‘KILL DEM’ and ‘Let’s Do It Again’ — appear on a deluxe version of the album, and Smith credits them with unlocking this new wave of productivity despite not making the final cut.

If In Colour was made to be blasted from car windows and portable speakers in the park, In Waves is best heard from supercharged speakers in a sweaty club. To create such a vibe, Smith launched the album by opening his very own club, The Floor.

The bespoke venue, based somewhat on the legendary London club Plastic People, where Smith had his formative clubbing experiences in the late 2000s, first came to Venue MOT in an industrial corner of south-east London. Across 10 nights on the bounce, he welcomed DJs and artists from across the dance music spectrum, from Charli XCX and George Daniel to Daphni and singer John Glacier, who appears on In Waves track ‘Daffodil’.

“I was so excited about being able to build my own club, which I’d dreamed of doing for so long,” he says. “Then, on night one and when I was realising there were nine left to go, it was pretty intense.”

A further five nights in New York and five in Los Angeles followed, with only one cancellation due to a malfunction on the booth monitors that left Smith with excruciating ear pain. “I needed one night of rest in my ears, because I couldn’t sleep with the tinnitus,” he explains. Smith speaks today of the whole experience of The Floor like it’s a fever dream, coloured by jet lag and a gruelling schedule, but made a point of heading into the crowd each night and immersing himself in the venue he’d always dreamed about attending and then ended up building. “I’m broken right now,” he winces.

Jamie xx’s second solo album arrives nine years after In Colour, perhaps the single defining UK dance album of the 2010s. On it, Smith sampled funk and soul classics and bent them into distinctly modern shapes on dancefloor hits ‘Gosh’, ‘Loud Places’, ‘I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)’ and ‘Girl’. Rightly, In Colour is still held up as a titan of UK dance a decade later.

Smith’s ability to mould any source material into dancefloor heaters was apparent almost instantly after he emerged as one third of the endearingly shy, strictly monochrome The xx at the end of the 2000s. In the years that followed their Mercury-winning debut album xx, Smith donned the Jamie xx moniker and released remixes for Radiohead, Adele, Dua Lipa, Florence + The Machine and more, and developed a divine and distinctive style through early singles ‘Far Nearer’ and ‘All Under One Roof Raving’. Released in 2011, We’re New Here, his full remix album of Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here, also spawned the euphoric ‘I’ll Take Care of U’, later sampled on Drake and Rihanna’s ‘Take Care’.

From this jumping-off point, Smith became a hugely desirable hired hand for some of the biggest artists on the planet, including Alicia Keys, Drake and Frank Ocean (though Smith has no idea if his contributions ended up on the latter’s Blonde, such is Ocean’s distinctive way of mangling his source material into delightfully odd new shapes). “I didn’t really enjoy [working with Drake], because I was in the studio and had to stay up late,” he reflects. “Everyone was smoking weed and I couldn’t do any of that.”

As he suggests, all this external adulation and party-starting ability is somewhat antithetical to Smith’s in-person demeanour. Sitting in the middle of the horseshoe of synths and assorted gear in his studio, the producer isn’t as notoriously shy as the press documented during his earliest days with The xx, but reserved is still a fair adjective.

If you can envisage him in a club, he’s nodding his head gently at the back rather than deep in the sweaty throng. “I try and go out as much as I can, but since I turned 30, my ability to do so has got a lot worse,” he smiles softly. “The hangovers suck, and I have to pick my moments now.”

“I didn’t really enjoy [working with Drake]. I had to stay up late and everyone was smoking weed – I couldn’t do any of that stuff”

Despite this aversion to being surrounded by others while creating, Smith says he wanted to “ease the pressure” on himself while making In Waves, describing the process of creating In Colour as “very insular”. To do this, he worked with external producers on Jamie xx music for the first time ever, bringing in Animal Collective’s Panda Bear (on ‘Daffodil’), Honey Dijon (‘Baddy on the Floor’) and most notably The Avalanches (‘All You Children’ and ‘Every Single Weekend’).

The collaboration with the influential Australian duo was of particular excitement to Smith. He first met Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi a decade ago when they showed up to his gig in Melbourne without his knowledge. By chance, Smith had put together a megamix of his favourite moments from their beloved debut album Since I Left You to open his show, and he recounts their first encounter with equal amounts embarrassment and pride.

“I was pretty starstruck,” Smith remembers of meeting the pair backstage after the show. “That album came out when I was 11 years old and basically taught me how to produce. They used to be so much more elusive than they are now — there was never any information about them really.” When getting in the studio together for In Waves, the trio realised they made music very similarly, with Smith attributing the resemblance to him basing much of his practice on Avalanches tunes.

The bubbling highlight ‘All You Children’ is anchored around a quintessentially Avalanches sample of singing children, while the track’s vocal sample — “All you children gather round / We will dance and we will whirl,” a booming voice declares — had sat unused in Smith’s archives for years, begging for a home. That song emerged from an extended version of the pair’s second In Waves collaboration, ‘Every Single Weekend’, which now exists in a truncated form as the album’s penultimate song.

“I have an imaginary library in my head of everything I’ve always wanted to use,” says Smith of his sampling process, with ideas staying on the shelf for years or decades before finding their perfect place alongside a new idea. This, teamed with Smith’s keen ear for new trends and central position within modern dance culture, makes In Waves a current yet timeless listen.

Alongside work on In Waves, Smith has also re-entered the studio with his xx bandmates Romy Madley-Croft and Oliver Sim to work on their fourth studio album. Since the release of I See You in 2017, his bandmates have joined Smith in launching distinctive and successful solo careers, with Madley-Croft now a purveyor of euphoric trance-pop under her first name and Sim becoming Hideous Bastard for an entirely Smith-produced album of dramatic synth-pop.

The trio also reconnect on In Waves with the dubby track ‘Waited All Night’. It originated from a session where Smith and Madley-Croft went to LA to “write for a bunch of pop stars” and ended up with the catchy offcut that forms the song’s chorus. “It’s great to see Romy being a full-on pop star,” Smith beams of his bandmate’s solo venture. “She’s going into the crowd and singing in the crowd — it’s wild.”

Working with Sim on Hideous Bastard, he adds, was particularly gratifying because “we just got to spend so much time together one-on-one, which is what we used to do when we were kids, before anybody wanted to hear the music we were making”.

Of progress on new xx material, and the impact of these solo careers on the band’s future, Smith says, “Now that we’ve all done our own things and we’re starting to get back in the studio, I think it’s going to be a bit harder, because we’re all slightly further apart musically. That was also the point of why we did it, so it’s more of a challenge, but I don’t know how it’s going to end up.”

In Waves, and this new era of Jamie xx, is defined by intentionality and a reconnection to why he first learnt to love the thing he does so well. This idea — and the album’s title — can also be linked to Smith’s newfound love of surfing. Away from studios, festivals and collaborations, he was able to reconnect to the core of his reasons for creation and prioritise patience and solitude.

“The hectic nature of touring and the life of a musician lends itself to having an extreme moment of calm, which is what surfing is,” he says, appearing far more at ease than when discussing the frantic lifestyle that his career demands. “Eighty per cent of the time is just about sitting out in the water waiting for the right wave.

“I’m a city boy and never really felt that urge to be out there in nature, but the first time I ever caught a wave, it was instant. I got it.”

Taken from the October/November issue of Rolling Stone UK – you can pre-order it here now.