2024 is definitively the year of the Dance Album, its cultural map dominated by Charli xcx’s all-conquering „Brat“, Fred again’s mammoth Reading and Leeds sets and the mass adoration of Chappell Roan’s queer carinval-esque pop. Along the way, scene stalwarts Four Tet, A.G. Cook and Floating Points have released some of their best work. It makes sense: almost exactly three years after clubs reopened post-pandemic, dance artists have now had time to regroup, reflect and fall in love all over again with the uniquely human experience of moving to beats in a shared space. And perhaps no dance album has been more eagerly awaited than Jamie xx ’s “In Waves”, the follow up to his acclaimed 2015 solo debut “In Colour”.
As an artist, Jamie xx embodies a mass of contradictions. Famous since his teens as one third (and sole producer) of critically lauded indie act the xx, Jamie Smith always seemed profoundly uncomfortable with the attention and expectation that success brought. The most introverted member of music’s most inward-seeming group, he confounded expectations two albums into the xx’s career by releasing the club-facing solo project “In Colour”, its title a play on the xx’s signature monochrome aesthetic. It was in every way the opposite of his work with the group that made his name. As Jamie xx, he quietly set about redefining the interface between dance, indie and pop, earning a reputation as one of the most sought-after acts and producers in the industry. Famously reticent in interviews, he, like many dance artists, found being behind the decks was a way to be comfortable occupying the limelight. Then he defied industry expectations again, by keeping everyone waiting, then waiting some more – 9 years to be exact – for a second album. In between, Jamie xx developed a daily surfing habit (which partly inspired this album’s title), travelled the world and did the growing up he’d never been able to do during all his years in the spotlight.
There’s always a risk in taking such long breaks as an artist. Will the ever-shrinking attention spans of audiences be held? Will the art live up to the heightened expectations built up over the years of absence? Happily, “In Waves” is worth every minute of that wait. It, like Jamie xx himself, rests on contradictions. It’s an album stuffed with tight, immaculately produced grooves, that simultaneously heaves with spontaneous emotion. An album in which Jamie xx’s own voice is completely absent, yet oddly ever-present. An album containing samples as diverse as an online yoga video, a monologue by a choreographer and a children’s poem about dance from the 70s. It’s a brilliant meditation on what dance means to humanity, that works perfectly on both a packed dance floor and a quiet bedroom.
“In Waves” is also inextricably intertwined with the pandemic, beginning life in those tentative days of societal re-awakening, when Smith would go out walking along the Thames and find himself at one of the many raves taking place up and down its banks. He recalls sometimes having to pay someone with a boat to take him to the other side of the river to yet another barge party. Reinvigorated, he found himself writing music for the dance floor, anticipating a time when a surging crowd could move as one again. The first of these tracks – “Daffodil” – is a slow, crackling, sultry groove about appreciating the small moments of beauty and connection: a daffodil in someone’s hair, the feeling of being “lost in the beat, lost in the wave”.
“In Waves” as a body of work expands out from that moment, a celebration of dance and the connections to be found on the floor. Jamie xx has compared DJ-ing to riding waves: he likes to get the crowd “into a mode then out of it again”. Accordingly, the album plays out like this, its loud, euphoric “waves” interspersed with moments of stillness allowing the listener to catch a breath.
Amongst the crashing waves, there’s the breakbeat-inspired, choppy “Treat Each Other Right”. First single “Baddy on the Floor”, a collaboration with Honey Dijon, blends jazz piano and soul into an irresistible combination of the old meeting the new. “Life”, which features synthpop legend Robyn on vocals, is a thumping, joyous paean to clubbing, its lyrics consisting of the silly, fun comments she and her friends would exchange on a night out: “You’re giving me first kiss. You’re giving me walk of shame. You’re giving me strong torso”. Then there’s “All You Children” a collaboration with groundbreaking millennial dance act and Smith’s childhood heroes The Avalanches, which combines a buzzing, addictive bass line, samples of children’s voices and a reading by American poet and activist Nikki Giovanni to brilliant effect.
Amongst the quieter “waves” are “The Feeling I Get From You”, featuring Smith’s own repetitive, melancholic piano triads and the startling, propulsive six-minute “Breather”, which samples the narration from a yoga video he used to do over lockdown. Smith’s bandmates and best friends Romy and Oliver Sim lend their hallmark intertwined vocals to the beautiful, yearning “Waited All Night”. And then there’s “Falling Together” the album’s trance-like opus of a closer, based on a monologue by choreographer and dancer Oona Docherty, with whom Smith collaborated over lockdown on various projects. The track, Smith says, made him more emotional than any other song here, helping him to realise the album, which he’d tried and failed to finish about seven times, was nearing completion. On listening to the track, with Docherty intoning “There’s a whole world in that dancer/A microcosm of everyone you love/Everyone you know/Every human being who ever was”, it’s not hard to see why.
Oliver Sim once told an interviewer that Jamie xx said to him when they were both teenagers, he was “at peace with the fact that I’m not going to make big waves in the world”. Whether intentionally named or not, this album is a huge wave that will be remembered not just as a great dance album, but as one of the greatest albums documenting these times. They say the best literature makes you feel as though a hand has taken yours. The best music does that too. We couldn’t have known in 2020 that an album like this would reach out to us and lead us all to the dance floor. But it makes it all the sweeter to take that outstretched hand now.