Read any coverage of The xx around their debut and you’ll quickly learn that critics, media, and fans alike truly believed the soft-spoken then-four-piece to be Britain’s greatest export since ...

During the summer of 2009, two seemingly unrelated and almost contradictory musical events occurred. The Black Eyed Peas wrote the song of the summer with the gratingly catchy and hyper-positive “I ...

The xx are taking photos of each other on the balcony of a penthouse in midtown Manhattan. It's a rare free moment between radio interviews, a performance on The Tonight Show and a flight to Germany.

That musical austerity is the most striking aspect of the xx’s sound. Each song is founded on the spare, kinetic interplay between programmed drumbeats and Oliver Sims’s lightly thumbed basslines.