Pregnant with potential meanings, the title of the xx’s immersive third album gradually reveals itself over the course of 10 new songs. It is not accusative – “I see you, stealing that guitar sound” – but more in keeping with the ongoing themes of this minimal, intimate band; more consolatory. “I see you”, this album says, “as you are.”
Prefaced by a series of more outgoing tracks, I See You has been touted as the xx’s least insular album thus far. If Jamie Smith’s solo outing of 2015, In Colour, constituted a successful experiment with shades beyond the minimal monochrome that originally defined the band, then I See You finds them a little gaudier of palette. Using samples for the first time, they have tweaked their sound in myriad ways, while still retaining the sense of proximity within spaciousness for which they are famous. You could say it was more commercial, if the mainstream hadn’t been biting the xx’s style relentlessly. (“Justin Bieber is doing tropical house,” noted Smith in a recent interview.)
The first song opens with a Caribbean horn fanfare, the shock of which will have you running to the track-listing to see if you haven’t accidentally hit play on a different band. Sinuous and garagey, Dangerous sounds like it could have come from Smith’s solo outing, and finds singers Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft sharing lines such as “I couldn’t care less/ If they call us reckless.”
Likewise, the bittersweet Say Something Loving is – in xx money, at least – an out-and-out pop song, with a nod to Sade’s The Sweetest Taboo (“Don’t let it slip away!”). Smith’s signature steel pan arpeggio sound is there, but – pace, Bieber – transcribed on to keyboards. As ever, Madley Croft and Sim – childhood best friends – enact a loving boy-girl relationship in which sex is absent but present, just directed offstage. Lips is a particularly sensual outing for this most glacial of bands. Throughout the album runs a subplot in which one sense takes precedence: that of seeing and being seen.
The three-way relationships that sustain the band were sorely tested over the course of recording. Sims, in particular, has stepped back from partying as a result. (“Does the night chase me?” he wonders on Replica).
Located at the heart of the album, Performance finds Madley Croft “putting on a show” and “playing hide and seek” while Smith’s scything keyboard violin sound etches zigzags above her head. The album closer, a gospelly piano-led duet called Test Me, is more abrupt. A ghostly analogue curlicue tracks a sonar bloop. “You look”, murmurs Madley Croft, “but you never see.”
