Coexisting

Oliver Sim is fresh off the plane having arrived in Melbourne after 42 hours of flying from Finland. It's part of a surreal stretch in the The xx's schedule, when the band, in advance of their second LP, Coexist, will couple performances with press duties; lurching about the planet, answering endless promotional duties and playing shows amidst the mayhem. This not of the same repetitious familiarity as touring, but something beyond. It's an itinerary befitting the young London outfit's unlikely rise to stardom, with a run of instantly-sold-out Australian shows just the latest landmarks in a career that's growing increasingly surreal.

“I have even less idea than you,” says Sim, 23, jetlagged yet affable, an imposing figure both tall (6'2-ish) and in boots of sizeable heel, wearing, of course, all black. He's attempting to answer the unanswerable: just how it is that The xx – Sim, the band's vocalist and bassist, guitarist/vocalist Romy Madley-Croft and beatmaker Jamie Smith – have achieved such straight-up popularity with music that is minimalist, half-whispered and almost never attention-seeking. “I'm in it, so I have absolutely no perspective on it,” Sim admits. “I don't know. All I can say is that I'm thankful. I've always loved what we do. But it is — and still is — surreal to me. It never ceases to surprise me. It wasn't just the first time I went to Australia it felt surreal, it feels that way now.”

The first time The xx came to Australia was early in 2010, when the band were booked to play the touring Laneway Festival and found themselves playing their hushed, nocturnal music - “I do a lot of my writing very late at night when I'm half-asleep,” Sim says. “It's when we work, so it's only natural that it seeps into what you do” – in the heat of the Australian summer, in the blazing afternoon sun. It seemed a strange setting to see them in, and it was a shock for the band themselves.

“We were really used to dingy clubs, to the safety of hiding behind darkness, coloured lights, smoke. Not having any of that, it makes you approach performing in a different way; makes you think of really having to perform, which we'd never really been forced to do. We'd never intended our music to be heard in a setting like that. So it was good to be thrown into that setting. It helped us grow a lot.”

At their return shows in July this year, Sim proved the one who'd taken those lessons in performing to heart, coming as close to a prancing showpony as any member of a band so bashful, moody, and meticulous could be. It's the audience's – and, in many ways, the world's – first taste of the material from Coexist, the much-anticipated follow-up to 2009's xx. The success of the band's debut – it won the Mercury Music Prize, went platinum in the UK, soundtracked endless adverts and the Euro 2012 soccer tournament – took everyone involved by surprise; even Young Turks, the XL-affiliated label that signed them as diffident teenagers. XL has had a run of ridiculous successes on their books – Adele, Dizzee Rascal, MIA, Vampire Weekend, The White Stripes et al – but The xx hardly thought they were next. “I can't work out what I was expecting when we made the first thing, but it certainly wasn't this,” Sim admits. “It came as a shock to everyone. It would've been really unrealistic of me – or of any of us – to expect anything on the scale of this.”

The xx were formed as a high school outfit, the product of the life-long friendship between Sim and Madley-Croft. With Smith, a DJ from his early teenage years, invited to improve the rudimentary drum machine tracks that back the spartan deployment of guitar, bass and voice, it was, from the beginning, a study in minimalism. “In the beginning it wasn't really thought out. Me and Romy don't have very loud voices, it didn't make sense to make a big sound that we can't contend with vocally. And the simplicity came from where we were as musicians. A song like VCR, I couldn't have played any more if I wanted to; I was literally just learning to play my bass. We were recording our demos on a five-track multi-tracker, so it was just two guitars, two voices and drums. It was limitations like that in the beginning which made the sound; it was very natural. Over time it's become a lot more aware, and it's been a case of having restraint. I think we all enjoy the subtleties in music. And we want to preserve those in our music.”

Which makes Coexist a preservationist work; in which the band admirably ignore all the temptations of multi-tracking and orchestration that could've come their way and instead keep space their defining element. Beyond preservationist, it was even reductionist: where the recordings for xx were made in a studio built in the basement of XL's offices – ”People were just naturally coming in and out a lot,” Sim says. “There was lots of input from others” – this time they used their Mercury winnings to build a studio space of their own, appointed Smith as engineer and producer, and set to work. Just the three of them, alone in the studio. For a year.

“We were working on it for a year before we played anyone anything. When we finally played it for someone else, our management, they didn't even have to say anything; it was just nice knowing that someone else had heard it and it wasn't just the three of us. Because it had been just the three of us for too long; I think in the end we went a bit nuts. Having three people in the one room together, fifteen hours a day, it gets intense.”

The bunker mentality was, in part, to keep out the expectations of others; or, at least, attempt to. “It would be an impossible mission to block out everything that's happened from our minds,” Sim says. “But because it was so internal – it was literally just the three of us for a year – it made is easy to be… This sounds naff, but: 'in the moment'. The people we work with were very, very patient, and understanding, and trusted us, and just let us do it on our own terms… The most pressure we felt came from ourselves. We weren't going to release something that we didn't feel confident in, that we didn't love.”

And, after their first album proved so beloved by the world, Coexist seems likely to attract just as ardent a following; meaning, The xx's unexpected rise may continue apace and life for Sim is to continue its increasingly surreal feeling. “It's so surreal just coming places like here, coming to Australia,” he says, again, gesturing around him with disbelief. “I didn't imagine our music would ever leave London, let alone bring us to the other side of the world, let alone take us to places we'd never thought we'd ever go and find people there that knew all the words. To go to places like the Deep South of America, to be eating alligator in Baton Rouge, it's like, 'How did our music actually lead us here?'”