The xx return bigger
Indie stalwarts The xx delivered one of Coachella Day 1’s most talked‑about sets, moving through classics like “Intro” and “Crystalised” while Jamie xx layered new textures that made the comeback feel bigger than expected. (latimes.com) (ocregister.com).
The xx walked onto the Outdoor Theatre at Coachella on Friday night and played like a band that had spent its years apart getting larger, not quieter. The Los Angeles Times called it one of Day 1’s most buzzed-about sets, and the Orange County Register put the trio among the festival’s standout acts from April 10. (latimes.com) (ocregister.com) That was a surprise because The xx built their name on the opposite of festival bombast. When the London group broke through with its 2009 debut album, songs like “Crystalised” and “Intro” felt like whispered conversations set to a drum machine. (yahoo.com) The gap matters here. The xx’s last studio album as a band was “I See You” in January 2017, which means this Coachella appearance arrived after roughly nine years without a new full-group album. (wikipedia.org) (yahoo.com) In those nine years, the three members stopped sounding like they lived in the same musical room. Jamie xx moved deeper into club music and released his second solo album, “In Waves,” on September 20, 2024, while Romy and Oliver Sim each built solo catalogs of their own. (jamiexx.com) (bandcamp.com) That solo detour changed the chemistry onstage in Indio. Reviewers described Jamie xx pushing the old songs with heavier textures and bigger transitions, so tracks that once felt skeletal landed more like late-night dance records built for an outdoor field. (yahoo.com) (ocregister.com) The clever part was that they did not throw away the songs people came for. The set moved through staples including “Crystalised” and closed with “Intro,” but the ending reportedly stretched into a noise-heavy breakdown that felt closer to arena rock than to the band’s old dimly lit minimalism. (dnyuz.com) Coachella was the right place to test that version of the band because Friday’s schedule put The xx on the Outdoor Theatre, the festival’s second-biggest main stage after the Coachella Stage. On the same night, the lineup around them included Turnstile and Disclosure, which meant they were playing in a slot built for scale, not secrecy. (thescenestar.com) (ocregister.com) There is also a small irony in “Intro” becoming the big finish. It started as a modest instrumental on the band’s first album, then grew into one of their best-known tracks through years of commercial placements, and now it is strong enough to anchor a comeback set in front of a festival crowd. (dnyuz.com) So the story from Coachella was not that The xx returned and played the old hits correctly. It was that a band once famous for restraint used nearly a decade of side projects, especially Jamie xx’s post-2024 club maximalism, to make those same songs hit with far more force on April 10, 2026. (jamiexx.com) (yahoo.com)
