In Waves and the Long Wait for the Jamie xx Follow-Up

In Waves came out on Young on 20 September 2024. It is Jamie Smith’s second solo record under his Jamie xx name, nine years after In Colour, and it arrived with a specific kind of anticipation that had been compounding slowly through club listings and tour posters across that interval. I bought it on Bandcamp on the release day. I have been playing it since. I saw him DJ at a warehouse date in Sydney in November, in a crowd that had been waiting a long time for this record and knew it had arrived properly.

I want to talk about what the record does and about the specific way it closes the gap between Smith’s DJ work and his studio work. The gap, across the last nine years, has been structurally real. In Colour was a studio record with club textures. Smith’s DJ sets, in the years since, have been louder, harder, and more interested in the specific physical work of a dance floor. In Waves is the record where the DJ shows up and writes for the studio.

The wait, and what it was for

Nine years is a long time between records for an artist whose main discipline is not solo recording. Jamie has been busy in that interval. I See You, the 2017 xx record. Co-writing and production on Romy’s Mid Air in 2023. Oliver Sim’s Hideous Bastard in 2022. A sustained DJ touring life that, by 2023, had him playing bigger rooms than most dance-first acts. What he had not been doing was writing a second solo record.

The delay appears to have been, partly, a matter of figuring out what the second record was for. In Colour worked because it was the specific 2015 sound of a post-garage London producer translating nightlife into a home-listening record. The specific 2015 culture the record spoke to has moved. A second record that repeated the first would have felt stranded. Smith, across various interviews in the last eighteen months, has described the nine years as a process of working out what the DJ sets had been teaching him and finding a studio form that could hold the lesson.

What the DJ sets had been teaching

Smith’s DJ work, across the 2019 to 2024 window, shifted meaningfully. The sets got harder. The tempo range widened upward. The structural use of classic-house and disco-edit material got more confident. The rooms got bigger. Importantly, the specific thing Smith does on the decks, which is build long, patient arcs that reward the dancer who stays the whole set, became more pronounced. His sets are not a sequence of peaks. They are one long peak that takes ninety minutes to crest and another thirty to descend.

In Waves is structured the same way. The record is eleven tracks, just under forty-five minutes, and it plays as a single arc rather than as a track list. The sequencing is the record’s formal argument. The opening, “Wanna,” is a warmed-up piano-house loop that sets the harmonic language for the rest of the record. The second track, “Treat Each Other Right,” brings in the first vocal and the first structural build. By the fourth track, “Baddy on the Floor” with Honey Dijon, the record has landed inside the register the rest of the record operates in.

If you DJ or have spent enough time on dance floors to read sets structurally, the record’s shape is legible as a specific kind of set-building. The album is not a compilation of club tracks. It is a single sustained piece of set-shaped writing.

The collaborators, specifically

The guest list is small and carefully used. Robyn appears on “Life,” the record’s pop-register track, and the choice to give Robyn a disco-adjacent Jamie xx production is exactly the record the collaboration should have produced. Honey Dijon on “Baddy on the Floor” is the record’s most explicit acknowledgment of the Black Chicago and New York house lineage Smith’s work has been drawing from and previously under-crediting. Dijon gets a full track and her vocal and presence shape the record’s centre.

Romy appears on “Dafodil” alongside Kelsey Lu, Oona Doherty, and John Glacier. The “Dafodil” credit list is the record’s most ambitious piece of writing and the one that rewards the deepest listening. Romy’s vocal is a register Smith has been producing around for more than a decade. Kelsey Lu’s cello and voice are the texture. Glacier’s spoken contribution is the structural pivot. Doherty is the movement. The track is a layered piece that the record slots at the point an arc needs a contemplative middle.

Oona Doherty is also credited as a principal collaborator on the record’s choreography. Doherty is a Belfast-based choreographer whose work has been recognised at major European dance venues. Her presence on the credits, and in the project’s broader live and video context, is an indicator that Smith conceived of In Waves as a record with a physical, embodied life that would extend beyond recorded audio. The tour has honoured that conception.

The production, texture by texture

Jamie Smith is one of the current era’s most specific textural producers. His work is identifiable by a small cluster of sonic habits: the steel-pan and steel-drum samples he has been using since the Gosh era, the specific way he handles kick-snare programming with a slightly swung 128-ish tempo, the use of garage-adjacent two-step rhythms under ostensibly four-on-the-floor tracks, the treatment of vocal samples as percussive rather than melodic objects. All of these habits are present on In Waves. What has changed is the confidence of the combination.

“Treat Each Other Right” is a good case study. The track is built on a vocal sample from a 1990 Vince Montana Jr. track (which the record credits cleanly), and the production treats the sample as the central structural element while rebuilding the surrounding arrangement. The sample is looped, filtered, pitched, and framed across a five-minute structure that reads as a contemporary production while honouring the source. This is the specific craft of sample-based dance music, and Smith is working at the top of the discipline.

“Breather” is the record’s most interior track and a specific formal counter to the bigger tracks around it. It is almost beatless for much of its length, built on pad work and a recurring vocal hook, and it sits in the sequence at the point the record’s arc requires a pause. The sequencing decision to put “Breather” where it sits is the kind of call you make after you have DJ’d for years and understand what a long set needs.

The live context

I saw the warehouse date in Sydney on 29 November. The set was three hours. The pleasure of watching Jamie DJ the new material alongside the classic-house, disco-edit, and UK-funky territory he works in live is the pleasure of seeing the record’s sequencing tested against a real dance floor.

The tracks from In Waves worked on the floor. “Baddy on the Floor” in particular landed where Smith placed it in the set, roughly ninety minutes in, and did exactly the structural work the record does at the equivalent position in the sequence. “Dafodil,” which is the harder track to place in a dance set, worked as a pause at the hour-forty mark. The sequencing had been tested on the road before it was finalised.

The record’s argument

In Waves is not a reinvention. It is not positioned as one. It is the deepening of a body of work Smith has been building across fifteen years, and the deepening is what makes the record important. Smith has the unusual position, for a dance-music producer of his scale, of being both a critical and commercial presence.

The record has been praised widely across the British and American music press. The commercial numbers are good. It has been playlisted properly. The DJ community has adopted multiple tracks into active rotation. What is less expected is the way it plays as a home listen. The arc that works on a dance floor also works on headphones at night. The record is the rare dance album that does both jobs.

What stays

Play it in sequence. Do not shuffle. The record is designed as a single piece, and the shuffle undoes the argument. If you can see the live show, go. If you can only hear the record, let it run the full forty-five minutes without interrupting it.

Jamie xx will not make a record every three years. His pattern is longer and his discipline is slower. What In Waves confirms is that the long wait produced the record it needed to produce. The next record, whenever it arrives, has a new weight behind it. In Waves is the one to keep close until then.