When Jamie Smith, Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft took the Coachella main stage on Friday evening, you could be forgiven for forgetting the momentousness of the occasion. The trio known as the xx has not performed together in eight years, save for a couple of warm-up shows in Mexico City ahead of the California festival, though they’ve hardly been absent from the music scene. Smith, the renowned electronic producer known as Jamie xx, is now a festival mainstay, while Madley Croft and Sim have each built on the indie rock band’s signature haunted sound with their solo material, 2023’s clubby Mid Air and 2022’s horror-tinged Hideous Bastard, respectively.
The three childhood friends still collaborate – Jamie produced Sim’s Hideous Bastard – and their long-awaited Coachella reunion, the first outing of a planned festival run and “new chapter”, felt more like peeking into an ongoing mind-meld than one of the buzziest sets of the festival. The group appeared in their signature all-black and launched into their 2009 debut single Crystalised as if no time had passed.
Which is not to say it wasn’t moving. Across nearly an hour with 16 tracks that seamlessly blended their forward-thinking, intimate headphone rock with their respective solo material, the xx delivered an impressively rangy and shapeshifting set befitting the veteran genre-bending act they have become. I’ll be the first to admit that while the traditional xx sound – atmospheric, intimate, with Madley Croft and Sim trading pensive lyrics in haunting deadpan – is undeniably influential, it’s perhaps not the ideal festival mood. It’s hard to imagine a Billie Eilish without the xx’s distinctively spectral production (“their ‘hauntingness’ gets referenced at least every other session, without question”, prolific songwriter-for-hire Ryan Tedder once said), though the band’s music generally feels anti-crowd. Luckily, the group has a virtuosic sense of vibe as well as Jamie xx’s peerless production – even slow-burn tracks such as VCR, from their self-titled 2009 debut, and 2017’s Say Something Loving, get a propulsive beat infusion, with hypnotic results (and to the delight of a few British accents I caught in the crowd).
Some Coachella festival programmer out there has incredible instincts: the xx’s transformative set, which began in stately grayscale and bloomed into full-color strobe lights, was perfectly timed for sunset, dusk staining the clouds rose-gold, then dark, as the music shifted from pensive to club. By nightfall, Jamie xx’s prismatic production took center stage for the exultant Treat Each Other Right, a searching remix of On Hold and a juiced-up version of Sim’s track GMT, the singer having wandered into the crowd. But it’s never less than a team effort – so well do Madley Croft and Sim’s aching vocals still pair together, so easily do they fold into Jamie’s spellbinding beats, that it’s hard to tell where the solo work ends and the band work begins.
An extra-pounding edition of I Dare You, perhaps the band’s most straightforwardly sunlit song, brought the journey full circle, before depositing audiences at the final number, the ironically titled and instantly recognizable Intro. This set, Sim says in his actual intro, “has felt the most special after so long away”. Filmed once again in grayscale, the band tore into what has become their pop calling card as if rediscovering it anew, then deconstructed the hazy instrumental into a thunderous bombast that ricocheted across the now dark festival grounds. It felt both like a statement of return and a reminder that what once remains: the journey goes on and on.
