DJ and producer Jamie xx is making waves on the dance floor with his new album ‘In Waves’

After a first solo album that caused a sensation in 2015, the producer of the British indie pop trio The xx returns with an inspired new album, full of unique dance anthems.

Nine years ago, his first solo album In Color (2015), a shimmering patchwork of textures and styles, forged a unique path and shook up British dance music. Sound architect of the indie pop trio The xx (with Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim), DJ, producer and remixer Jamie xx demonstrated, with this solo escape, his incredible science of sampling. Or how to compose feverish hymns of unprecedented depth, by drawing on any sound source and especially from the incredible musical bank housed in his brain.

Jamie xx releases his second solo album on Friday September 20, In Waves. And it is to a new orgy of textures, auditory sensations and clever grooves that this inspired album invites us, guaranteed to make us dance this fall.

As in the first clip made for this album, Treat Each Other Rightit is to a decadent end-of-the-world party, where nothing is going right, that the sound magician invites us. Because his music delicately carries under the mirror ball all the melancholic anxiety of the time. We are far here from the imperious and triumphant dance by the kilometer. That of Jamie xx hiccups, shivers and worries, under its contagious euphoria of rave.

Since 2015, Jamie xx has not been inactive. He composed the third album of The xx I See You (2017), he co-produced and produced the albums of his colleagues Romy Madley Croft (Mid Air2023) and Oliver Sim (Hideous Bastard2022).

He has also composed for a ballet and worked for Frank Ocean and Tyler The Creator. He has also discovered a passion for surfing, which pushes him to go regularly to Biarritz to catch the waves – undoubtedly one of the references of the title of this new opus, In Waves.

The Londoner began working on this album in 2020, during the pandemic. James Smith, his real name, began by delving back into his and his parents’ record collections, full of old soul and jazz records (which can be found on several tracks), reconnecting with the enthusiasm of his younger years, when he feverishly mixed on the pair of turntables given to him by two of his uncles for his 10th birthday. A time for himself, which, he says, reactivated the freshness of his initial creativity.

This time, the shy and discreet Jamie finally opens wide the doors of his studio, and invites a number of friendly voices: those of Romy and Oliver (Waited All Night), by the Swedish singer Robyn, to whom he gives a false air of Madonna between two blows of the castanets (Life), by Honey Dijon (Baddy On The Floor), and the haggard and cottony ones of Kelsey Lu, Panda Bear and John Glacier (Dafodil). We also note the presence of the Irish choreographer Oona Doherty on the finale Falling Togetherand that of the Australian duo The Avalanches (All You Children), the very same ones whose production methods Jamie xx says he dissected and imitated as a teenager.

Even without anyone at the microphone in the studio, this album remains very talkative. It whispers (literally) in our ears: “Breathe. The past is gone, the future is uncertain. Be grateful for the present moment. Here and now.” This foggy voice, on Breatherit is that of the yoga teacher whose classes he followed on YouTube during confinement.

The hubbub of conversations on the dance floor also regularly invites itself into the field of our consciousness, skillfully throwing confusion into each person’s intimate memory – this feeling of “déjà-vu, déjà vécu”. This is particularly true on the most astonishing track of the lot, Still Summerwhich borrows its melody from Nights in White Satin of the Moody Blues. This 1967 hit that struck us without us being able to identify it at first, is here chopped up, transfigured and twisted with a magician’s talent, and we can easily imagine the hedonistic trance it will arouse in the club.

Elsewhere, Jamie, 35, whose erudition is worthy of a musicologist, does not hesitate to crudely reveal the seams of his work as a sound wizard, a way of bringing forgotten artists back to the forefront. Thus, on the haunting Treat Each Other Rightwhich samples a soul track from 1975 (Oh My Love by Almeta Lattimore), he suddenly lays bare the original title in an accelerated version, before making the infrabass attack the hips with an irresistible fury.

Jamie Smith dares everything, but he is demanding. He also admits to having remade this album several times, overcome by doubt and sudden bursts of inspiration. His meticulous work as a goldsmith makes all the difference. Dense, sensitive, intelligent and bursting with surprises, most of the pieces onIn Waves are nonetheless cut out for the dance floor. A feat.

He also launched his own tailor-made club in London last May, The Floor, for ten intense nights in residence at MOT, a nightclub in south-east London, where he invited the DJs and artists he loved until the early hours. This realization of an old dream continued this summer with five crazy nights in New York and five more in Los Angeles. We would love for him to launch a residency in France. In Biarritz, where he would take advantage of it to catch the wave?

Jamie xx “In Waves” (XL/Beggars) out Friday, September 20, 2024