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Forward-thinking beat innovator jamie xx sets out to louder places on house baddy.

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Jamie XX is no new kid on the block. After procuring highly sought-after blended beats of atmospheric indie with The XX in the late 2000s, he soon turned to his own masterful enterprise opting for a more danceable approach, certainly with 2015’s full-length In Colour with artful Loud Places, its sweeping ambience beautiful and equally empowering.

This time, the Summer House residency artist drops the technicolour with the boss-eyed optics of In Waves, a second record eight years in the making.

This time around, it’s another four-to-the-floor dancefloor romp bounding with gospel-house, techno rave homages, filtered trance and electro dance in a polished twelve-track entourage Jamie back to his best.

With an expansive guestlist to boot, in Waves is a much cosier close-up of the past 60 years of dance music at Jamie’s fingertips to work with. The two-step vibes of Treat Each Other Right darts from one broadcast to the next, weaving in dreamy gospel samples before our feet are back on the sand. Romy and Oliver Sim bring their breathless vocals to Waited All Night, a peaked tonic to the dying embers of a party. Jamie’s collab with fellow electro-conspirators The Avalanches brings a new wealth of psychedelic grooves to the forefront in wonderful taste with the likes of The Feeling I Get From You and Breather. Another vital lot to the bunch is All You Children, which is equally bright and colossal in its sound. It’s not entirely linear and sets the precedent for a man constantly thinking for the next project – ever evolving.

While it boasts that same feral energy and temperaments we’ve grown to see in Jamie’s work, it feels like it’s not pushing its chest out as much as in Colour did.

In Waves opts for a more transient trance dance tact and while that tunes in with the norms of now – certainly with deep house interlude extraordinaire Fred Again setting the pace – it ironically, has less vibrancy and colour to it. I may be more of a fan to the ambient alternative, and that is what is perhaps swaying the judgement call here – but there’s no doubt that In Waves will have its own place in the footfalls of dance music before too long.

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