Jamie xx – ‘In Waves’ review: star-studded meditations on the dancefloor

18 September, 2024

Jamie xx, photo by Alasdair McLellan

Arriving mid-way through the turbulent 2010s, Jamie xx’s debut album ‘In Colour’ was one of the greatest of the decade. The work of an absolute perfectionist, here was a dance record that evoked the way in which sadness and euphoria – communality and loneliness – can exist alongside one another. Not for nothing did NME award the album almost top marks, concluding it was “defined by its creator making perfect choices”.

Here, then, nine years later, is the follow-up from the man tasked with injecting some sparkle into The xx (theoretically his main gig). And what long years they’ve been. David Bowie was still alive the last time Jamie xx released a solo album. Brexit was a mere threat, rather than an economy-thumping reality, and the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency still seemed like a bad joke. It would be another half a decade before Covid-19 wiped out dancefloors across the globe for a couple of years.

Which brings us to ‘In Waves’, a record that took shape during the pandemic, as globe-trotting DJ Jamie Smith found himself grounded and with more than a little time on his hands. It’s typical that while most artists rushed out their pandemic records as soon as restrictions eased, Smith sat on his, presumably tinkering with every snare and vocal snippet, measuring each track with beady precision.

‘In Waves’ wears its creator’s perfectionism with surprising lightness: such long-gestating records can often feel airless and over-produced, but Smith has crafted an immaculate album that still feels loose and energised. The brittle beat that rises up from ‘Breather’’s robotic spoken-word mantra; the charged, wordless vocal sample that ripples through opening track ‘Wanna’; the gentle piano notes that edge through ‘The Feeling I Get From You’ – this is minutely observed dance music that amounts to a unifying, emotive whole.

It helps that Smith has invited a coterie of stellar guests into the mix. His xx bandmates Romy and Oliver Sim bring their tastefully understated vocals to the UK garage indebted ‘Waited All Night’ and Aussie dance titans The Avalanches grace the pulsing ‘All You Children’. Robyn’s swaggering tone lifts the jubilant, discofied ‘Life’, while the funky house-infused Honey Dijon collab ‘Baddy on the Floor’ proves itself the album’s most undeniable dancefloor clarion call.

Packed with meditative spoken-word vocals, this is an even more melancholic record than its predecessor – and a less immediately exciting one, too. But it’s arguably a more complex beast, born of a complex era yet authored by a musician with one eye on the simple, timeless pleasures of the club. With ‘In Waves’, almost a decade on from the triumph of ‘In Colour’, Jamie xx remains in bloom.