Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	8.1/10
Metacritic	87/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	A
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian
The Irish Times
MSN Music	A
NME	8/10
Pitchfork	8.7/10
Rolling Stone
The Sunday Times

xx is the 2009 debut album by English indie pop band the xx. After they signed a contract with XL Recordings, the band recorded the album from December 2008 to February 2009 at the label's in-house studio in London. Audio engineer Rodaidh McDonald worked with the xx during the recording sessions and strived to reproduce the intimate, unembellished quality of their demos. The band's Jamie Smith produced xx on his laptop and created electronic beats for the songs, which he then mixed in a detailed process with McDonald.

Although the xx had been strongly influenced by R&B acts, the album also drew comparisons from critics to alternative rock, electronica, and post-punk sounds. The melancholic songs on xx featured minimalist arrangements and were built around Smith's beats, Oliver Sim's basslines, and sparse guitar figures played by Baria Qureshi and Romy Madley Croft, who employed reverb in her lead guitar parts. Most of them were sung as low-key duets by Croft and Sim, both of whom wrote emotional lyrics about love, intimacy, loss, and desire.

xx was released in August 2009 by Young Turks, an imprint of XL, and received widespread acclaim from critics, many of whom named it one of the year's best records. It sold consistently over its first few years of release, becoming a sleeper hit in the United Kingdom and the United States. Although none of its singles became hits, xx benefited commercially from the licensing of its songs to television programs and the band's Mercury Prize win for the album in 2010.

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Wikipedia