A conversation about emotions in the club, great pop songs, new starts and Romy’s debut album MID AIR.
The sum of its parts: Jamie xx emancipated himself from his regular band The xx more than ten years ago and made a very good name for himself as a remixer, producer and solo artist. Last fall, Oliver Sim followed suit, but his album HIDEOUS BASTARD, produced by Jamie xx, received little attention. As the third member of the group, Romy Madley Croft is now venturing into the spotlight alone.
Romy Madley Croft was still at school when she formed her band. A dorky kid who recorded sad songs in his teenage room with another dorky kid. Most of the time nothing comes of this story, you grow up, do an apprenticeship or go to university, your former best friends become acquaintances with whom you go to the pub in your hometown every Christmas.
The big hype
Not so with Romy, her first and also her stage name: the student band was called The xx, the debut album, released in 2009, was what you would call an “instant classic”. The hype was huge, the first tour sold out quickly – in Berlin, for example, they played their first concert at the legendary Lido, after which co-founder Oliver Sim was seen frantically smoking in front of the door and asking the audience whether the show was really any good? She was. And shouldn’t be the last. Over the next eight years, many, many more concerts would follow across the globe, two more albums, awards, festival appearances and at some point even their own festival. Maybe it’s what they call a whirlwind.
That was fourteen years ago now. Fourteen years, four, and then very quickly just three black-clad kids from south London with a maximally minimalist sound full of longing and melancholy created something that sounded really new and exciting. Fourteen years in which first beatmaker and producer Jamie xx succeeded with his own projects such as a DJ career, remix and then a solo album, and then, after a long tour for the third album, I SEE YOU, the band went into a creative one in 2018 Pause disappeared. Or should that be the end? More on that later, but this much has already been said: sometimes a break from a relationship is just the thing you need to move on with renewed vigor.
For now: Clear the stage for Romy Madley Croft. Croft, who was just 19 or 20 when they first toured the world. Croft, who started a band with her best friend and could never have imagined what would come of it.
“I’m just a curious person”
ROMY: “When I think about the music we made as teenagers – I’m so proud of us. I can’t believe we made this music, it feels like it was a different person. Your teenage self sometimes feels like a pretty distant person. I could never have imagined The xx reaching the status we have achieved. The number of people we have reached out to with our music is simply unimaginable. I’m so grateful for that! But after the third album I reached a point where I became curious to learn new things, find new inspiration and meet new people. I’m just a curious person! And up until then I had only ever worked with Oliver and Jamie.”
This search for something new has now taken shape: MID AIR, the Romy solo album. The reason why Romy sits at a round wooden table in Berlin on a gray summer day, still a little shy. Not that she doesn’t have experience with interviews – she’s certainly done dozens, if not hundreds, throughout her career. But she always had her bandmates with her, Oliver and Jamie. And it was music that the three of them created. All alone, for an album that she alone is responsible for and that deals with her private experiences much more openly, that is a new, an unusual experience. Croft is now the last of the trio to release a solo album. Of course, like her colleague Oliver Sims last year, also through her house and farm label Young. There has to be family. But was there a feeling of having to catch up with your bandmates?
“I didn’t plan on doing a solo project, I actually wanted to write songs for other people. As a way to write music without pressure. And I noticed that I write very personal music and people around me asked me if I really wanted to give up these songs. It took me a while to get to the point of saying: I really want to do this project, I feel ready.”
“I learned how great pop songs can be”
Quietly and away from the spotlight, Romy had already started writing songs for other people during The xx times. “As a way to express myself without the pressure of it having to be a ‘The xx’ song,” she explains, “I learned how great pop songs can be.” Pop songs that then become part of her DJ sets were when she returned to a DJ booth five years ago after more than a decade: “I started DJing when I was 17, but then I didn’t stop for years. At the end of the last The xx tour I started doing it again, also because I wanted to find that curiosity, that desire for music again. When I DJ, I listen to music completely differently, very intensively, and start looking for new things.”
MID AIR is inspired by these experiences, by dark clubs and queer euphoria on the dance floor. Of great emotions and the liberation that lies in excess.
“It took me quite a long time to figure out what I wanted. I knew pretty early on what my references should be, what songs I love, but it took a long time to develop the self-confidence to really admit that this was something I wanted to do. My inspiration was queer love anthems and club classics, big, emotional trance tracks that are meant to party, celebrate community and are so generous in what they give to the audience. Songs with great lyrics, like ‘The Rhythm Of The Night’. This is a fantastic dance song, but it works just as well on the piano. That kind of thing fascinates me.”
Croft has found the perfect collaboration partner for this sound: In addition to Jamie xx (of course) and Stuart Price, Madonna producer and part of Zoot Woman, the album was created primarily in collaboration with producer and electro singer-songwriter Fred Again.. What of course sounds like a contemporary, calculated music business move has actually grown quite organically:
“I met Fred five years ago at a songwriting session, we were both writing for other people. This was long before he recorded his solo stuff. I knew he had written and produced some incredibly good pop songs and we became really good friends. We wrote a lot together and some of it got pretty personal. At some point we wrote ‘Love Her’, which is now the first song on the album. He asked me: Who is this for? And I answered: Maybe for me. This is how this process began. At some point he showed me what he was working on and all I could say to him was: definitely keep doing it, it’s so good! I was so happy for him that he spent his time on his own project because he had always given a lot of time to other people before. I’m so proud of him!”
So MID AIR had to wait a while before it could see the light of day. Nevertheless, the album sounds extremely contemporary and fits seamlessly into the current rave and trance revival, with borrowings from house and big pop gestures. Croft’s succinct, breathy voice is looped and underpinned with jagged drum bass and sometimes flickering, sometimes spherical synths. This could sound like bubblegum pop that will be forgotten tomorrow if it weren’t for the intense lyrics, especially “Enjoy Your Life,” whose video, produced by Croft’s wife, also incorporates images of her late mother as well as moments of carefree lightness. On the sound level, too, life inside and outside the dance floor blurs, sounds from cell phones, from private life, like bandmate Sims calling her at her bachelorette party, seem like an excited moment in the club queue. Elsewhere it gets very sacred with choral singing that takes up the album title MID AIR, that state of suspension that a euphoric night in the club can trigger. But why did nightlife become such a dominant theme on the album?
“I like to go out, observe and take it all in”
“I understood that the club is a space where I can find access to my emotions. I’m not the kind of person who goes out and then totally throws up and doesn’t remember the evening. I like to go out, observe and take it all in. Maybe let go of my inhibitions a little after a few drinks, because I’m a person who often swallows emotions in everyday life. I like the feeling of liberation in the club, the conversations in the smoking area or on the dance floor, when you let go and open up to the other person.”
It is these moments when you can completely absorb yourself in the now, in the night, in the company of other night owls, perhaps even process what you have swallowed, and make peace. With yourself, with your experiences, with the world. At least that was Romy’s experience. And since the release of “Enjoy Your Life”, undoubtedly the central song on MID AIR, these conversations between the dance floor and the smoking area have moved to another level: listeners respond to the song and share their own experiences with loss and Grief. “This is… unbelievable,” says Romy, “so surreal and so touching.” Full circle, you could say, the circle is closing.
Full Circle, that brings us back to this other band that determined Romy’s entire adult life. If you scroll through their Instagram account, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of comments begging for The xx to get back together. Instead of giving the audience what they long for, Romy now releases this very, very different sounding album, with which she separates herself as an individual from the band collective. How do you deal with these expectations?
Completely different from The xx
“I see all this news and I don’t take it for granted that people out there still care about The xx. Although we haven’t released any music for quite some time. At the same time, I knew that if I wanted to be confident enough to start a solo project, it would have to be very different to The xx. I could have written a few guitar ballads and finished them a lot quicker, but I wanted to challenge myself and do something different.”
Does this mean The xx era is finally over? No, quite the opposite: for Romy, doing something different meant that she wanted to immerse herself in the shared world of The xx again. Together, as a band. And so the trio is standing together in the studio again while they are out there celebrating their individual sound, their individual liberation. Together, and yet alone. Somewhere in between, but floating “mid air” full of deeply felt euphoria.