Four years of recording produced forty-four minutes of music. Nine years passed between In Colour and In Waves. And yet the decision that governs all of it happens almost immediately: Jamie xx has said that whether a piece of music is worth sharing is a feeling he gets within the first half a day of making it.
That is the reconciliation between a very slow career and a very fast instinct. Most of those four years were not spent deciding whether ideas were good. They were spent finishing the ones that had already passed the test.
Why He Stopped
His account of the gap is unusually candid. He has said that he got good at touring in his twenties but did not have room for anything else in his life, which is a precise description of what a successful electronic career does to a schedule.
Lockdown broke it. He cooked, read, stayed off screens and spent time with friends, and when he came back to music he described himself as completely reinvigorated. What followed was, in his words, his favourite experience of making an album, even though it was hard and took a long time.
He has gone further, saying he learned to enjoy the difficult parts because he was aware of what he was doing, and that this time he was simply happy to keep going. That is a different relationship with the work than the one that produces an album every eighteen months.
Less Is More
He has admitted to envying artists who release frequently while holding to the view that less is more. Set against the current norm in dance music, where producers issue singles monthly to stay in playlist rotation, two solo albums in fourteen years is close to an act of protest.
The half-day rule is what makes that sustainable rather than paralysing. An artist who trusts an early instinct can discard quickly and then commit completely, which is why four years of work yields under forty-five minutes rather than a double album of maybes.
Twelve Tracks and a Long List of Guests
The album opens with Wanna at two minutes fifteen and closes with Falling Together, featuring the choreographer Oona Doherty, at five thirty-seven. In between sit Treat Each Other Right, Waited All Night with Romy and Oliver Sim from The xx, Baddy on the Floor with Honey Dijon, Dafodil with Kelsey Lu, John Glacier and Panda Bear, Still Summer, The Feeling I Get from You, the six-minute Breather, All You Children with The Avalanches, and an interlude called Every Single Weekend.
Erykah Badu appears on the deluxe edition. That is a guest list assembled across genres rather than from a single scene, and the presence of Honey Dijon in particular anchors the record in house rather than in the indie-adjacent electronica his earlier work was filed under.
Six singles preceded it, running from Baddy on the Floor in April 2024 to Waited All Night two days before release. Releasing half an album in advance is a strategy that only works when the tracks function individually, which club records do and album tracks often do not.
Breather
The six-minute track at the centre is called Breather and does what its title says, inviting the listener to slow down. On a dance record that is a structural decision rather than a mood.
It also connects to what he has said about the album being an attempt to be present. He has described wanting to make something fun, joyful and introspective at once, and likened the experiences behind it to waves everyone has been through together and alone.
What He Was Following
The pressure behind the nine-year gap is visible in what came before it. In Colour, released on Young Turks on 29 May 2015, scored 87 on Metacritic. Pitchfork gave it 9.3 and called it a dazzling culmination of six years of work; AllMusic and Q both gave full marks; NME and Spin gave nine out of ten.
It was nominated for the Mercury Prize, for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the Grammys and for British Album of the Year at the Brits, reached three in the UK and one on US Dance/Electronic Albums, and Pitchfork later placed it twenty-fifth among the two hundred best albums of the decade.
Eleven tracks, with Romy on SeeSaw and Loud Places, Oliver Sim on Stranger in a Room, Four Tet co-producing, and Young Thug and Popcaan together on I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times). Following a record that well received is a genuine problem, and taking nine years is one legitimate answer to it.
What the Reviews Said
Metacritic settled at 84. Clash gave nine out of ten and musicOMH five stars. NME and the Guardian both gave four, with the Guardian calling it a well-polished record that hits the target far more often than it misses. Pitchfork gave 7.3 and described it as animated by the ecstatic and easy pleasures of the dancefloor.
Variety placed it second among the year’s albums and Time Out sixth. Commercially it took five on the UK Albums Chart and one on UK Dance Albums, two in Flanders, ten in Australia and three on US Top Dance Albums. The Billboard 200 placing of 146 is the outlier, and it describes the ordinary gap between British and American appetite for this kind of record.
Big Rooms and Small Ones
The touring that followed included two sold-out nights at Alexandra Palace in London before the show went to North America, Asia and Europe, on top of South American and Australian dates.
He has said he is comfortable playing both huge shows and tiny clubs while remaining anonymous walking down the street, which is an accurate description of his position and a rare one. Very few producers can fill Alexandra Palace and still take a two-hundred-capacity booking without it reading as a stunt.
That range is the same one Fred again has been exploiting by pairing weekly releases with phone-free shows, and the two of them played the same London hall within a couple of years of each other. The methods could hardly be more opposed: one releasing faster than anyone, the other slower than almost anyone, both arriving at the same venues.
The xx Are Recording Again
Romy has confirmed the band are back in the studio working on a new album, their first since I See You in 2017. Both of Jamie’s bandmates appear on In Waves, which suggests the working relationship never really paused.
How that squares with a producer who takes nine years between his own records is an open question, though the half-day rule offers a clue. An artist who can tell almost immediately whether something is worth pursuing is well suited to a band, where the slow part is agreement rather than discovery.
It is also worth noting how consistent the personnel have been across fifteen years. Romy and Oliver Sim sang on In Colour and sing on In Waves; the label is the same operation under a shortened name; the sound has widened without changing hands. For a producer whose reputation rests on knowing quickly what to keep, the people have evidently passed the same test as the tracks.
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