Jamie xx has hardly been inactive over the last decade. The DJ and producer, whose real name is Jamie Smith, composed the score for a ballet and scored Roman Gavras’ film The World Is Yours before resurfacing in April 2020 with ‘Idontknow’, the first in a series of one-off singles. In 2017, he reunited with Sim and Madley Croft for the xx’s third LP, I See You, and helped produce both of their debut solo albums. He kept testing out new material in his various and increasingly high-profile DJ sets, as well as in his Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 show during the first weeks of the pandemic. Outside of music, he traveled across the world and took up surfing, which informs the title of his new album, In Waves. One of the standalone tracks, ‘KILL DEM’, was inspired by London’s Notting Hill Carnival, where he DJed for the first time in 2022 but has attended since he was a teenager. The restlessness that’s defined Smith’s career, though, nearly drained the life out of him. “I don’t remember anything pretty much from when I was 18 until I was 30,” Smith said in a recent interview. “It’s all just a blur of being in a different city every day.”
In retrospect, it’s hard not to see some of that blurriness seeping through 2015’s In Colour. As backward-facing and nostalgic as it was perceived at the time – qualities that did little to detract from its widespread acclaim – the record has clearly stood the test of time, and not just because its brand of introspective, feelings-forward club music (a prospect one outlet then deemed “ridiculous”) is particularly fashionable right now. The album may have served as the average indie fan’s entry point to electronic music, but it was also nuanced and expansive enough for any listener to revel in the tiniest details for a long time. Buoying the hushed vulnerability, even modesty, of the record was a revolving door of emotions, but also a sense that melancholy and euphoric abandon could exist within the same breath, the same way moments lost their individual timestamp in the vastness of it all.
Though just as layered and naturally in conversation with past sounds, In Waves is primed for, and actively aware of, the present moment – and not just in the way that late-album cut ‘Breather’ intersects Smith’s love of dance music with transcendental meditation (“The past is gone/ And the future is uncertain/ But what we know right now is this moment”). Take how that song recalls ‘Anadlu’ by Kelly Lee Owens, an artist Smith played on that Essential Mix, and who has recently been steering her music in a less introverted, more dancefloor-ready direction – as Smith does here. The Floor, a pop-up club Smith built inside the Bermondsey venue MOT, has welcomed guests ranging from Daphni and Axel Boman to Charli XCX and the 1975’s George Daniel (whose label dh2 is releasing Owens’ new album). The long wait between records guarantees the new one will be hailed as timeless, but there’s something refreshingly tapped-in and of-the-moment about In Waves, even if, with its autumn release, it would seem to arrive just a tad too late.
Feel-good mantras like “All we gotta do is treat each other right” and “You’re giving me life” are laced all over the record. But it’s precisely because of Smith’s attunement to contemporary dance music trends that In Waves, as a whole, avoids veering into cliché. With simmering exhaustion around both the “return to the club” narrative that culminated with BRAT and the kind of sentimental, tasteful electronic music that could only, as Shaad D’Souza wrote in his review of Fred again..’s ten days (for a publication that notably panned In Colour), “soundtrack forlorn glances, abject tragedies and single tears dribbling from perfectly glossed eyes,” In Waves could go wrong either way. Instead, it reminds us that Smith is a master at both of these modes, capable of infusing the album’s snappy, frenetic dance music with woozy, communal emotion. To Jamie xx, focusing on the present practically translates to finding ways not to conform but condense the genre’s familiar thrills, even if it means cutting intros short and part of the subtlety out.
Yet even as a more robust, crowd-pleasing endeavour, In Waves keeps the pulse going in ways both surprising and enveloping. The meditative sprawl of ‘Breathe’, for example, turns out to be one of the weirder and more fractured stretches of the whole LP. The life-affirming directness of ‘Treat Each Other Right’ bleeds into ‘Waited All Night’, which benefits from the very distinct intimacy harnessed by the xx members, flirting with that hazy territory while delivering one of the album’s most immediate choruses. And ‘Dafodil’, its biggest oddity and standout, comes right after the particularly in-your-face ‘Baddy on the Floor’, a song that delights in its repetitiveness as much as the tinier interplay between the bass and horn sample. The more crowded it becomes, the more In Waves distinguishes itself from the insular (however collaborative still) process behind In Colour, whether it’s in the form of Robyn’s playful giddiness, the Avalanches’ eccentric production touches, or the array of voices – Panda Bear, Kelsey Lu, John Glacier – mystically corroding the “lovely sweetness” in the air that fills ‘Dafodil’.
Playing the songs live may have helped perfect the flow of the album, but the more a thing vacillates, the harder it is to find the right ending. In Waves lands on ‘Falling Together’, a shamelessly grand and sincere piece narrated by Irish dancer Oona Doherty, who directed the video for ‘Idontknow’. Because they’re not repurposed in the form of a sample, her words are less ambivalent in their cosmic wonder, but also more human: “Look again at that dancer,” she instructs, “What the fuck/ That’s it/ That’s all there is.” That’s us. In Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami described surfing as “a more profound kind of sport than it looks,” which reminds me of something I recently read in Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising: “That’s what makes surfing feel like more than sport: It requires destiny to be on your side, the ocean must favor you.” Jamie Smith may have gotten a taste of this since he picked up a board, but he clearly also understands it’s a lot like being at the mercy of music – something so rare, and to quote’ The Feeling I Get From You’, “a little stronger than beautiful.” Regardless of setting – but preferably in a dark one – that’s where In Waves takes you.
