The xx give away more details of upcoming album

The approach to the band's anticipated September release has been building momentum with interviews in Pitchfork and the NME this week, as well as a new live video.

In the wake of the announcement of The xx’s second album, Coexist , to be released this September, the band have been gradually unveiling new snippets of information about the follow-up to their Mercury Prize-winning debut The xx.

Most insightful has been a frank interview that you can read over at Pitchfork. With charming, characteristic openness, Romy, Oliver and Jamie explain in the feature the writing and recording process that took place in their velvet-clad studio.

The physical and personal closeness of The xx’s recording process apparently characterises Coexist; Jamie says, “There was a period when we were making this album where I was struggling because I had just come off doing a load of production for other people, so I had to re-learn how to produce for us as friends rather than somebody I hardly knew, or just for myself. I’m not great at meeting new people, so it was really nice to be back in the room with my two best friends. And the final thing is actually quite similar to how we made the first record. We tried not to over-complicate things, even though we could have done.”

Addressing the “dancey” influences on the new LP, Romy clarifies, “There’s quite a few songs on the album that are slower and have a different atmosphere. We’re saving them and still working them out. But I definitely think that this album goes more into a house-y side of things than the first one. When we were playing live on the last tour, we were remixing the ends of songs, and we liked that element.”

The specific sound that we can expect from the record is elaborated on even more in an interview also published this week in the NME, which sees Romy explain the intimacy of the album’s content: “A lot of it is still personal, but I’ve been a bit more inspired by things that have happened to other people and putting myself in their shoes. But they’re all love songs and some of them are sadder than others.”

A fresh video has also surfaced of the band performing one of their brand new tracks (seemingly the one named as ‘Friction’) at Primavera festival in Barcelona in May, which you can watch below.