Blog: Beats Per Minute

It's been three years since The xx's eponymous debut. It's a significant portion of time for a group that seems so involved with the emotional repercussions of age and maturity. On xx, singers Romy Madley-Croft and Oliver Sim were reciting lines they'd been writing since they were fifteen. Lines about love, sex, and relationships, delivered in a kind of abstracted back-and-forth, male/female perspective that's come to define who The xx are as a band as much as their mixture of dank R&B, slinky post-punk, and after-dark electronics. The group has remarked on fan anecdotes about how meaningful and important [...]