JAMIE XX WAVE AFTER WAVE

Nine years after his decade-defining debut album In Colour, Jamie xx returns with In Waves, a darker and broodier follow-up that saw him fall back in love with making music

- WILL RICHARDS

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."