The xx. In Manila, finally.

If you hear a song from The xx for the first time, chances are you’ll find it familiar. Even if the band has not pierced the mainstream market yet, their songs have been included in soundtracks. Maybe you watched I Am Number Four. Maybe you’re a fans of the television lawyer drama Suits. When you heard they were coming over, you may be interested in catching them live.

 

If you, on the other hand, are already a fan of The xx, you no longer need any convincing. You already know there will be nothing like watching them live. You’ve always felt that they sung for you, that their lyrics told your story better than you could ever do.

 

In 2009 the south London trio’s debut album xx bled steadily into the public consciousness to become shorthand for newly refined ideas of teenage desire and anxiety. Articulated with a maturity beyond their years, its hallmarks were restraint and ambiguity. In the age of the over-share, xx was pop with its privacy settings on max. 

 

Three years on, Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, and Jamie Smith are back with a new album, Coexist. And for the first time, they have come to hit Asia with stops in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manila. 

 

On July 30, at The NBC Tent, fans of The xx will finally live the day they’ve been dreaming of. Random Minds Productions announced early in June that the band added a last minute stop in Manila for their Asian tour.

 

Following the release of xx, the trio spent the lion’s share of 2010 far from home. Critical acclaim was matched by commercial success around the world, before The xx won the 

UK’s prestigious Mercury Music Prize. With all the success and new experiences of that intense year and a half, a period away from the stage and studio was inevitable. 

 

In late October 2010, The xx returned home from tour for some time apart, and some semblance of normality. “It was nice to go home and have a life,” Croft said in an interview at KEXP. “We wanted to have a life to write about,” added Sim. “We weren’t going to write songs about being on a tour bus.”

 

Their songs are unique because these offer a new take on things. Their words are as fresh as their sound. The lyrics pierce through their audience, honest and true. You were more than just a friend, oh but the feeling. It never came to an end, I can't bear to see you.

 

“All of our friends had been to university and left home,” says Croft. “We really wanted to do that natural thing that you do when you go to uni or grow up.” All three moved out of their family homes within two weeks of being back. They made up for lost time with friends, hung out, and embraced a summer of festivals and shows that Smith was booked to DJ. 

 

Behind the scenes, there was evolution too. Croft and sim’s writing process on xx had been to exchange lyrics over the internet and only sing what they each had written. Having begun to write again quite soon after returning from tour they discovered that their initial reticence to bare so much of themselves in person had faded.

 

That realignment extended to Smith’s role. When he originally joined the band, they’d been writing and gigging for a year. This time around it was the three of them working together from the start. 

 

Smith found a space in Angel that would become their studio. Essentially a couple of rooms in an ordinary office block, they turned the once mundane space into a nocturnal hub of creativity among the nine-to-five surroundings, hanging black velvet on the walls as soundproofing and fitting it out with a set-up that now included piano, drums, and steel pan. Back together again, separate from both their label in west London and east London’s music scene, the three wrote Coexist.

 

“We just ended up playing new stuff to each other to try and write which was a fun way to do it,”

explains Smith. However the process was wasn’t always plain sailing: “The idea I had at the beginning when we started wasn’t the right idea because I’d been in a place where I was making music for Drake and other people, and myself, and I’d kind of forgotten about working with these two, which is very different because we’re so close.” Smith said. “Learning to work together as grownups was the biggest thing - it’s the thing that influenced the album the most. We just needed to find a balance.”

 

Understanding that balance became the heart and soul of Coexist. “Jamie has done his solo 

stuff and Oliver and I have done separate things but The xx is only when we’re together. That’s when it’s really us,” explains Croft. “I was reading up on oil on water - when you see a puddle on the floor and it’s a rainbow. Oil and water don’t mix, they agree to peacefully coexist. I really liked that - these two simple things, oil and water, that together make something beautiful.”

 

While the fingerprints of R&B remain, Coexist’s dawn realizations flicker into life under house 

music’s gaze. It also echoes in Croft’s guitar riffs and Sim’s bass lines, which circle and build 

like loops. What has changed for The xx? Nothing, and everything. Older and wiser, surer yet still so tender, Coexist finds itself on the other side of heartbreak, when the light returns. 

 

The xx found the balance and on July 31 they want you to hear it. — Carlo Pamintuan/BM, GMA News