Jamie XX & The Avalanches – All You Children

Album : In Waves

Label : Young
© 2024 Young

Will we ever get another album from The xx? Who knows, but “Waited All Night” offers a reason to hold out hope. One of the best songs from band member/producer and remixer extraordinaire Jamie xx’s third record is a band reunion of sorts: Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim trade high-end premium vocals over Jamie xx’s foundation of glitchy beats and bits from the early-aughts British girl group Mis-teeq.

The whole thing skitters and slides, hiccuping like a carnival ride, and it’s just one of the exciting, all-over-the-place moments from In Waves. “Baddy on the Floor,” a collab with DJ Honey Dijon, dabbles in disco and house, putting samples of Divine Styler’s “Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin'” and Keni Burke’s “Let Somebody Love You” through a blender with hard, bouncy bass beats. No surprise, Jamie (né James Smith) digs deep on soul and R&B samples, dusting off some Almeta Latimer for “Treat Each Other Right”—a glowstick-ready dance track with what sounds like revving sonar signals—and Tina Moore (back after a late ’90s U.K. garage revival) for “Wanna,” which starts off wildly intimate, with bare-bones piano, before developing into something way more complicated.

Jamie also has excellent taste in collaborators, tapping Robyn for giddy-fun “Life,” which finds the Swedish singer hitting it hard and shining bright like a diamond: “You’re giving me life/ Shitty, pretty, wild … Giving me life/ Get it, make ’em gag.” Panda Bear shows up for “Dafodil,” which works in both Astrud Gilberto and J.J. Barnes’ versions of “Touching You” and manipulates Kelsey Lu and John Glacier’s vocals til they are blurry, dreamlike (“Everyone feeling soooooo goood”).

The Avalanches join in on “All You Children,” which relies heavily on a sample of Nikki Giovanni reading “Dance Poem” and boasts excellent builds, speaker-shaking rhythms and a mesmerizing chant by the Kids Theatre of Oz.

A version of “Breather” is already a live favorite—Jamie xx has worked out many of these songs in the DJ booth from Coachella to Paris’ Rock En Seine—thanks to its anxious beats and robo self-help voiceover (“You deserve to feel good/ You deserve to be healthy/ Just surrender”); it’s six minutes of pulsing, club-ready shimmer. Another party starter, “Still Summer” streaks through the sky and nicks a bit from Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin.”

© Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz