ON JAMIE XX: IN WAVES
BY JEFF WEISS
If all art is magic, it’s most resonant when it merges into both the timeless forms and temporary frailties of existence. With In Waves, Jamie xx has conjured a spellbinding portal. He replicates the emotional crescendos and thrilling volatility of an almost mystical night out—one where you return home in the cigarette ash dawn, the specifics of the last eight hours already blurring, but aware that these feelings will remain a crystalline memory.
In Waves is a melancholy paradise of bliss, heartbreak, and introspection. The story of a journey where you merge into the divine pulse of shadows, light, and dancefloor rhythms. A strobelike epiphany about the illimitable possibilities and spiritual capacities of humanity. Nine years after his debut solo masterpiece, In Colour, the London producer has not only eclipsed the heights of its predecessor, he has somehow made all supernatural adjectives and analogies seem understated.
In a sense, it is the culmination of a personal odyssey. Success found Jamie xx before he could even understand the implications. In 2009, the xx’s self-titled debut—entirely produced by then 18-year-old Jamie Smith—became one of the most commercially and critically revered touchstones of the indie era. It earned the group platinum plaques, a Mercury Prize, major licensing syncs, and expectations that could have easily become debilitating.
As one of the most in-demand producers of his generation, Jamie has remixed Radiohead, Adele, and an entire album from the immortal jazz griot, Gil Scott-Heron. In 2012, the xx’s Coexist defied the sophomore slump to top critics’ polls and sales charts. Slightly over two years later, In Colour defined the moment when dance music finally terraformed the mainstream. Pitchfork gave it a 9.3 and called it a “dazzling culmination” of his last six years. These were silken grooves sampled with orphic precision from rare soul, jazz, and psychedelic wax. If you were outside in the summer of 2015, it was difficult not to be swayed towards a new sect of old-time religion, sparked by the Young Thug and Popcaan-assisted psalm, “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times).”
The intervening years haven’t been particularly pleasant to anyone rooting for the human condition. No stranger to existential despair, Jamie entered his 30s and began seeking answers. Why was he still making music? What was the point? The straightforward route offered lavishly paid festival and club gigs. He could have become a producer-for-hire making technically superb but formulaic pop. Instead, he reassessed his own strengths and limitations as a person and artist. He stared inside his soul and wondered if the rest of his life might be better served chasing different phantoms.
There were travels across the world where he took up surfing. He produced the xx’s acclaimed third album in 2017 (I See You) and worked on Oliver Sim’s solo project. The activities temporarily helped, but Jamie eventually returned to the same emotional baseline. He was treading water and bored by solipsistic self-obsession. Then the pandemic struck. Lockdown began. There were no options but to stay home and create.
The genesis of In Waves traces back to a Radio 1 Essential Mix that Jamie made for the BBC in April 2020. It encompasses long-time personal heroes (Roy Ayers and Fela Kuti, Tom Ze, Phillip Glass), favorites from the latest generation of UK dance music (Two Shell, Kelly Lee Owens), and early iterations of songs that wound up on the album. In Jamie’s own words: “It reminded me why I love this music. I started to enjoy the actual creation process and forgot about the end game—because there wasn’t that option in lockdown.”
During the same period, a series of illegal raves popped up on barges and boats in the Regent’s Canal in Hackney. On any given Friday night, you could rent a bike, pedal down to the water, and discover several different parties. Because there was nothing much to do during the week and because it felt like the world might be ending, there were no burdens about future obligations or anything beyond the fleeting eudaemonia of the moment. It felt reminiscent of the hedonistic abandon of the classic rave era, where everything felt uncharted and societal transformation seemed imminent.
The challenge for In Waves was how to distill and recreate this notion of transcendence: to flip sacred artifacts from the near-distant past without crass nostalgia; to speak to listeners with spoken word passages on a packed and chemically peaking dancefloor without coming off corny; and to do it while unleashing teardrop bangers to detonate under the disco ball.
Rest assured; this is next to impossible. But Jamie somehow surfs a tsunami on a slab of plywood. In an age of bloodless algorithms, In Waves is a testament of unalloyed human sensitivity. It’s a life-affirming antidote to decay and entropy. A headphone listen to spirit you into a different dimension, yet something that simultaneously demands to be experienced on a communal dance floor.
Much of the music took shape as Jamie tested it out during his DJ sets between 2021 and 2023, carefully gauging crowd reactions and further refining the propulsion. Over the course of these experiments, the album began to replicate the intensity of a raucous dance party enshrined in club lore.
Within the first seconds of the opening track, “Wanna,” you are submerged in the slipstream. A moaning peal echoes from an atavistic chamber. It sounds less like a sample from legendary late ‘90s UK garage track “RIP Groove” than heavenly shards of emotion. A snare winds up, an airhorn cracks the clouds, and it parts into a sunburst of house piano chords and R&B heartbreak. Within the empty spaces, you can see into an endless savannah of intimate memory. You are beckoned into a more colorful and improved world, where the consequences of the past are salient, but able to be sweated out at the right volume.
With a sorcerer’s sleight-of-hand, Jamie xx manipulates tempo, rhythm, and pitch—swiftly cutting between sub-genres and decades. He seamlessly layers Northern Soul, disco, garage, acid house, techno, tropicalia, hiphop, funk, and the sounds of contemporary underground UK pirate radio. He expands on the foundation of Larry Levan and The Avalanches, Moodymann and Burial while reshuffling sepia memories, empyrean samples, and bent-knee emotion.
The minor moments are as impressive as the overarching ambition. Take the stretch starting at the 45-second mark on “Treat You Right,” where a muscular breakbeat-meets-future soul burner drops out. The chipmunked vocal suddenly sounds snatched from ‘60s AM radio gold. The words “I’ll never let you down” are stretched into eternity, then a beeping pulse kicks in over atmospheric synths. The original sample soars back like a celestial hand, steering the track towards the sweaty catharsis of the dance floor.
On “Waited All Night,” a collaboration with his partners in the xx, Romy’s ethereal lament pauses mid-track. The beat slows to a crawl, then Oliver offers a soothing counterpoint. The aesthetic beauty and elegant simplicity feel like a dispatch from another era—one where pop music still reflected personal love letters of joy and sorrow—rather than the product of boardroom calculation.
This is a record destined to be run back at different points in your life, where you always hear something new. “Baddy on the Floor” finds Jamie and Honey Dijon creating a work of cashmere funk that wouldn’t have felt out of place booming from the speakers of Paradise Garage at 2 am. It reconciles ostensibly impossibility dualities: innovative but familiar, vintage but hyper-modern.
Situated heart-like in the album’s center, “Dafodil” is a swirling summer symphony featuring Panda Bear, John Glacier, and Kelsey Lu. It transmits a story about a dance floor floating on clouds of ecstasy, where you are transported into the Hacienda in ’88 or Plastic People in ’09 or whatever DJ is saving your life right now. Shortly thereafter, Robyn appears on “Life,” a hymn- as a nü-disco affirmation, replete with a bronze rain of horns that sound dialed from a sanctuary where none of the world’s ails could ever tarnish. It’s what falling in love sounds like. When the vocal bellows “there’s no tonight” on “The Feeling I Get From You,” you reflexively interpret it as a liberation from temporal realities. Then what sounds like the holy spirit of McCoy Tyner takes over on the keys. By the finale, “Falling Together,” In Waves taps into something beyond any singular vision. The dancer Oona Doherty’s voice describes a scene over a spare skittering drumbeat. You’re surrounded by space, a small thing, almost nothing, shrouded in darkness. You look again at that dot, that stage, the whole world, a microcosm of everyone you love and everyone who ever was. Then the synths kick in like an ancestral ritual. A deep primordial groove washes you away.
When the beat finally exhales, you are transported back to whatever personal recollection is most indelible. Walking out of the club, squinting at fledgling rays of tangerine light filtering through the clouds. You’re not quite ready yet to say goodbye to your friends, new and old. Sparking up whatever’s left in your pockets, you feel a final wave of euphoria rush through the bloodstream. The world appears as a stained-glass trance. You are grateful to be here now, where everything is infinite, and it is hard not to believe that you could ever stop floating.
IN WAVES JAMIE XX
JANUARY 9 – 12, 2025
WADE THOMPSON DRILL HALL
CO-PRESENTED BY PARK AVENUE ARMORY AND THE BOWERY PRESENTS
Jamie xx Artist
Daphnee Lanternier Creative Direction
Tom Edwards (Mandylights) Lighting Design
Chase O’Black Video Direction
Cameron Stewart Tour Direction
Ian McCarthy Production Management
Caius Pawson & Simon Guzylack (Young) Management
Sam Hunt (Wasserman) Agency with
Kiernan Laveaux Thursday, January 9
François K Friday, January 10
Nick León Saturday, January 11
Dee Diggs Sunday, January 12
ABOUT PARK AVENUE ARMORY
Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory supports unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of 19th-century European train stations—and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory provides a platform for artists to push the boundaries of their practice, collaborate across disciplines, and create new work in dialogue with the historic building. Across its grand and intimate spaces, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chairman Emeritus
Elihu Rose, PhD
Co-Chairs
Adam R. Flatto
Amanda J.T. Riegel
President
Rebecca Robertson
Vice Presidents
David Fox
Pablo Legorreta
Emanuel Stern
Treasurer
Emanuel Stern
Marina Abramović
Abigail Baratta
Joyce F. Brown
Cora Cahan
Hélène Comfort
Paul Cronson
Jonathan Davis
Tina R. Davis
Jessie Ding
Sanford B. Ehrenkranz
Roberta Garza
Kim Greenberg
Samhita Jayanti
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Edward G. Klein, Brigadier General NYNG (Ret.)
Ralph Lemon
Jason Moran
Janet C. Ross
Stephanie Sharp
Joan Steinberg
Dabie Tsai
Avant-Garde Chair
Adrienne Katz
Directors Emeriti
Harrison M. Bains
Angela E. Thompson*
Wade F.B. Thompson*
Founding Chairman, 2000-2009
Pierre Audi
Anita K. Hersh Artistic Director
