Into The Music
Eight years is a long time to be away. In the music world, eight years is enough for entire scenes to rise and collapse, for streaming to swallow the album format whole, for algorithms to curate fandom in ways that would have felt science fiction back in 2018. The xx stepped off the road after their I See You cycle and quietly let their members go pursue solo careers. Romy made polished, aching club music. Oliver Sim made a confessional record about mortality and queer identity. Jamie xx made In Waves, a record that reminded everyone why he is one of the most important producers working in any genre. They all did fine, actually more than fine.
But when The xx walked onto the stage at Mexico City’s Pepsi Center on the night of April 4th, in front of a crowd that had been waiting nearly a decade for this moment, something clarified. The solo work mattered. The time apart mattered. But this, the three of them playing together, turning a room into something quiet and enormous at the same time, this is something that does not exist anywhere else.
They opened with “Crystalised,” the first song from their 2009 debut, and the choice was no accident. It is a statement of origins, a reminder of where this all began: two introverted teenagers making restrained indie pop that somehow convinced the entire world to lean in and listen harder. The gap between that song and the room full of people experiencing it in 2026 is strange and beautiful to think about.
The setlist spread across all three of their albums, weaving in solo material from each member mid-show. Jamie xx played “Loud Places,” which felt enormous in an actual room. Oliver Sim played “GMT,” which felt like standing very still in a city that is always moving. Romy played “Enjoy Your Life,” which felt like the whole point of everything. Then they came back together for the final stretch.
The show closed with “Night Time,” “Sunset,” and “Infinity,” a sequence that felt less like an encore and more like a landing. Not a triumphant return, not a nostalgia exercise. Just three people remembering how to play together and finding that the thing they built still works, still sounds like nothing else, still asks you to be quiet for a moment and actually feel something.
Two more nights followed at the same venue before they head to Coachella, Kilby Block Party, and Outside Lands over the summer. The Mexico City shows were sold out within hours of going on sale, which tells you everything about how much people missed this.
The xx said this was the beginning of a next chapter. There is no new album announced yet, no specific details beyond the festival run. That is fine. Sometimes the fact that a band chose to come back at all is enough of an announcement. The rest can wait.
Eight years of absence and then a show that apparently reminded people what they’d been missing, that’s a specific kind of cultural re-entry that’s worth thinking about carefully. The xx built their sound on restraint and negative space, which is actually quite close to certain Central Asian musical traditions where what’s left out carries as much weight as what’s played. Whether that translates to a live setting after this long a gap is a real question.
Eight years away and streaming swallowed entire scenes in that time, the article isn’t wrong about that. I keep thinking about how much of the Canadian indie ecosystem that coexisted with the xx’s early era just quietly evaporated, labels like Saved By Radio, artists like Woodhands or Dusted who were making equally interesting music and got no second chance. The xx get a triumphant return piece and that’s fine, but the survivors writing the history is always a complicated thing.
Chris, the Canadian indie ecosystem point is worth following up on because it connects to something I explain to my students all the time: cultural moments don’t exist in isolation. The xx’s quiet, spacious sound influenced a generation of artists in ways that crossed borders, and a lot of that cross-pollination happened in smaller scenes that don’t get documented. When a band like the xx goes quiet for eight years, those downstream conversations sort of pause too. A reunion show isn’t just nostalgia, it can restart a whole set of ongoing conversations about what that sound meant.
Eight years and they can still fill a room! That’s the test right there. I want to know what Jamie xx is doing on guitar these days, because that whole minimalist thing they had going was deceptively technical. Easy to underestimate how much discipline it takes to leave space in a song. Not everyone can resist the urge to fill it all in, you know?
Eight years!! I keep thinking about how kompa artists do this too, they disappear into the Caribbean circuit for years and then come back and the crowd just picks right back up where they left off. There is something about music that holds memory better than we give it credit for. The xx carrying that same kind of feeling through eight years of silence says something real about what they built.