In the Space Between Words

The xx make music that sounds like the moment just before something is said. Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim pass lines back and forth like two people who’ve already had the conversation and are now just circling it—all restraint and implication, almost nothing on the surface. Their debut did this so precisely it felt less like a record and more like overhearing something private in an adjacent room.

Coexist, their second album, doesn’t try to expand that formula so much as hollow it out further. Jamie Smith strips the production down even more, and the space left behind fills with something harder to name than silence—anticipation, maybe, or its absence. Angels is as close as the album gets to open feeling. Fiction closes inward completely. Reunion does exactly what its title suggests, and manages to make that feel complicated.

They played a sold-out show in Berlin the same evening the album went up to stream. I wasn’t there. The record is the right length for a late walk home anyway, which is probably the best recommendation I can give it.