The xx arrive with their debut album 'xx' - a whole new sound of love, loss and longing. Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, and Jamie Smith are edging into our hearts. The enveloping vocal partnership of Romy and Oliver is one that would've dropped-jaws in any decade this century, and set amidst a shivering soundscape of beats and plucks, their bedroom-reared concrete-soul is being justly heralded as the UK's most original and treasured alt.pop artifact of late.

The xx story starts with the two fronting bandmates: the intimate spirit of their sound. Best friends from an early age, as Oliver notes, "We learned to speak together, and eventually, we'd one day coax one another into singing together. We were too scared to sing to each other so we compromised by singing at the same time." They've rarely gone it alone since, with Jamie noting, "I've repitched them in the studio and it's actually spooky. They're basically the same voice. It's almost something instinctive."

At the formative stages of recording, early 2008, they worked with various producers they respected including Diplo, Lexx, and Kwes, who picked up on the band via a series of much-loved bedroom recordings posted online and an growing, devoted live following. But attempts to find anyone that could make them sound better than one of their own didn't go far; the band not wanting to draw too much distance from the DIY aesthetic of their early demos which were recorded in bedrooms through one in-built laptop mic, oddly by ripping the audio of video recording made on Photobooth. And so the stark, soulful blues of their debut album 'xx' took place under no one's watch other than Jamie, and engineer Rodaidh McDonald at XL Recordings' west London in-house studio.