It\u2019s been eight years since The xx performed together as a band, but it sure didn\u2019t feel like it when the U.K. trio took the Main stage on Friday. <\/p>\n
For one, the members haven\u2019t exactly disappeared. Producer\/drummer Jamie xx is a festival mainstay and one of the most sophisticated, exultant DJ\u2019s working. Romy Madley Croft became a sapphic-nightlife sovereign in 2023 with the clubby \u201cMid Air,\u201d after Sim\u2019s own minimalist, horror-streaked \u201cHideous Bastard.\u201d<\/p>\n
The band\u2019s songs are among the most timeless of their generation of indie rock. Forward-thinking enough to reinvent the guitar-bass-drums palette for the EDM boom; yet stark and lovelorn enough to pass for Motown in another era.<\/p>\n
Yet their return was among the most buzzed-about sets of the festival this year, a credit to how well their catalog has stood up on the merits. At their debut, they almost singlehandedly inaugurated a shift towards hyper-intimate headphone pop – it\u2019s hard to imagine Billie Eilish sounding quite the same without them. <\/p>\n
Yet on Friday, they bolstered that purity with the confidence, swagger and precision of the veteran rock act they\u2019ve become. <\/p>\n
Dressed in their typical all-black palette, their faces carrying a little more gravity and composure with age, the set slipped between the ships-in-the-night duets of \u201cShelter\u201d and \u201cVCR\u201d to the after-hours whomp of Romy\u2019s \u201cEnjoy Your Life.\u201d \u201cOn Hold\u201d best married the band\u2019s two worlds, sample-soaked yet rock driven; \u201cAngels\u201d remained a peerless devotional ballad. <\/p>\n
There was a sweet irony watching them close the set with \u201cIntro,\u201d a modest instrumental jam from their debut that has, through well-paying commercial placements, become their calling card to mainstream pop. It still rips. They even wrapped it up with into a noise-staggered breakdown that felt like actual stadium rock. Leave it to these three to drift into the murk of a warehouse club for a near decade, and come back bigger rock stars and more powerful a band than ever. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been eight years since The xx performed together as a band, but it sure didn\u2019t feel like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[2909,19534,174064,20831,174069,94490,93,174066,16225,61,174067,10928,60,174068,278,174071,174070,174065,742],"class_list":{"0":"post-393051","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-age","9":"tag-band","10":"tag-buzzed-about-set","11":"tag-coachella","12":"tag-composure","13":"tag-debut","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-festival-mainstay","16":"tag-friday","17":"tag-ie","18":"tag-indie-minimalist","19":"tag-indie-rock","20":"tag-ireland","21":"tag-little-more-gravity","22":"tag-music","23":"tag-romy-madley-croft","24":"tag-swagger","25":"tag-xx","26":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}