Marcel Winatschek

The Wham! Song with All the Hope Removed

The xx covering Last Christmas is almost too perfect a fit—take Wham!’s glossy eighties production down to its bones, drop in that signature negative space, and suddenly a song about being dumped at Christmas sounds genuinely desolate rather than merely festive. Romy’s voice doesn’t reach for anything; it just sits in the room with the loss. Which is precisely what made The xx so compelling from the start: the space between the notes carrying as much weight as the notes themselves.