Intro

“Intro” opens xx, the debut album from London’s The xx, released on Young Turks on August 14, 2009. It is a pure instrumental. No vocals, no verse, no chorus. A clean guitar figure in A minor repeating over a quiet rhythm, building in small increments across two minutes and eight seconds and ending without having arrived anywhere. It functions as a threshold. The album on the other side is intimate and spare. Two voices. Minimal instrumentation. Silence used as an instrument. Jamie xx produced the record in London between December 2008 and February 2009. What came back was 38 minutes that felt like a private transmission. No singles from the album became hits. The album did.

Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, and Jamie Smith had been schoolmates since they enrolled at Elliott School in South London at age 11. All three studied GCSE Music together. A fourth member, Baria Qureshi, played guitar and keyboards on the debut album before departing shortly after its release. Romy and Oliver wrote the lyrics by email, sending files back and forth between them. Oliver described the tracks as two voices existing in parallel rather than in conversation: not a dialogue but two people speaking at the same time, each true to themselves. The sound they built drew on trip-hop, R&B, and indie guitar but stripped away everything unnecessary. What remained was just enough.

xx won the Mercury Prize in 2010 and sold one million copies, a slow-burn success that built over years rather than launching on release. “Intro” was never a single. It accumulated a different way. Sampled, licensed for film trailers and advertisements, covered on piano at funerals and weddings. The guitar figure became one of the most recognized opening passages of its decade. Seventeen years after its release, it still functions the same way it always did: it opens a door and holds it. What happens next is up to you.