It's hard to believe that there hasn't been a Jamie XX solo album yet, but the kid's been busy — two albums with his day job The xx, popping up at seemingly every festival on God's green earth, and remixing everyone from Radiohead to Adele. After releasing two indispensable summer soundtrack songs last year — "Sleep/Sound" and "All Under One Roof Raving" — he finally announced the album those tracks will find a home on. In Colour will drop some time in June on Young Turks, and in the meantime we get another sample courtesy of the BBC: "Loud Places," featuring his xx counterpart Romy Madley Croft.
So what keeps a Jamie xx song featuring Romy from just being an xx song? The answer is obvious enough once the song hits its first peak, a perfect deployment of a sample and hand claps, elevating Romy's whispery vocal to something warmer and universal. While xx songs tend to look inward, Jamie's solo production reaches out to the crowd, finding some quietude in even the loudest of places.