Romy from The xx spoke to Beats 1’s Julie Adenuga about touring, Texas and the highly anticipated upcoming album.
On Touring
I’m just really nervous, I’ve been off stage for a long time, but it’s just going to be great to play some new songs and actually look into people’s eyes and see the reaction. That fits in with the title, it kind of has a lot of meaning to us, but one of the meanings is, when you’re going to a gig and you stand in the front row and you look at the people on stage, I always used to think they couldn’t see me, I’m just invisible, and then I got on stage and I could see everybody. That’s one of the meanings of the title, and a message to our fans.
The Album
It’s a collection of quite different sounding songs, different from each other. We let go of any sort of rules we had for ourselves before. In the beginning, we wanted to make sure everything was always playable live, and because, honestly, we couldn’t insert our instruments very well on the first album, because we wanted to make sure we played it live, things were more minimal and spacious, that was our limitation.
We wanted to open the windows and be like, let’s try completely new things, let’s get out of our comfort songs, which as more introverted people, our comfort zone is quite a small place, so just getting out there and meeting new people, going to places we didn’t know and recording there, and sharing the music
Working as a band
We’re getting better at talking things through, we realised that with our friendship, we need to put some time and energy into it, and we all went off to do our separate things whilst making the album. Sometimes we did feel far apart from each other, and it was tough at times, but then coming back together, we realised things hadn’t changed, we just needed to give it time and spend time together.
On Marfa, Texas
The first proper recording trip we had was in Marfa in Texas, which was a world away from London, we’ve only ever recorded in London before, and I think just getting out of London and being in a really unfamiliar place and feeling the togetherness of not being able to go home at night and being all together, it was actually really good for us, a nice memory as friends rather than just being in a band.
Having that freedom and experimenting with things, and not feel so trapped in just having to do it the way we did it before, so I have really great memories of being there.