xx

The xx arrive with their debut album xx - a whole new sound of love, loss and longing. Gingerly dodging the storm cloud of hype hysteria that plagues seemingly every other new buzz act of the moment, Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, Baria Qureshi and Jamie Smith are edging into our hearts. Their unique make-up is an inadvertent second nature marriage of 2009's urban/guitar tribes, in one corner fluttering new wave indebted reverberation, in the other, plumes of post-dubstep sub-bass and figuratively, their defining core of rich R&B vocal textures. If it all reads on paper like some potentially post-modern hotchpotch, then this makes their timeless results all the more alluring. The enveloping vocal partnership of Romy and Oliver is one that would've dropped-jaws in any decade this century, and set amidst a shivering soundscape of beats and plucks, their bedroom-reared concrete-soul is being justly heralded as the UK's most original and treasured alt-pop artifact of late.

In an effort not to draw too much distance from the DIY aesthetic of their early demos, which were recorded in their bedrooms, they recorded their debut album xx under no one's watch, other than engineer Rodaidh McDonald, at XL Recordings' west London in-house studio. The result a wash of sexy, coy, cold and sad rhythms and melodies the likes of Robert Smith, Massive Attack and The Streets.