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‘Not having a phone is the dream’: Jamie xx on dance music, modern life and getting hooked on surfing

Since nailing the zeitgeist with the xx’s Mercury-winning debut, the DJ-producer has collaborated with everyone from Drake to Wayne McGregor. As his second solo LP drops, he talks about his newfound desire for calm

It tells more of a story.” Not a lyricist himself, he expresses himself through guest vocalists (Robyn, Panda Bear, his xx friends), crate-digging samples and, increasingly, spoken word: the dreamy dancefloor recollections of American singer Kelsey Lu on Dafodil, a monologue by yoga teacher Juliana Spicoluk threading through Breather’s big-room techno. During those strange temporal grey areas in lockdown, when the country was tentatively half-open, he was cheered up by the illegal boat parties that took place on the canals near his east London home, seeming to echo the merry outlaw tenacity of early 90s rave culture. “I wasn’t elbowing my way in but I was trying really hard to prove that I could do it.” It was similar when XL Recordings founder Richard Russell asked him to remix Gil Scott-Heron’s 2010 comeback album, I’m New Here – Smith’s first solo project.

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