As a teenager, Romy Madley Croft burned CDs to play in gay clubs, loading them with unabashed floor-fillers like Ultra Naté’s cathartic house hit “Free” and Ian Van Dahl’s elegiac Euro-trance anthem “Castles in the Sky.” She later went on to become guitarist and co-lead singer of the xx, the influential indie band she founded with her school friends Oliver and Jamie. Together, they were masters of the spaces in between, their intimate ballads built around sparse guitar riffs and fleeting tableaux. But she cast her mind back to her queer club days—when pop was appreciated “without cynicism or irony”—after she started writing for stars like Dua Lipa and Halsey, in collaboration with EDM collagist Fred again.. (real name Fred Gibson). Somewhere along the way, she began to realize that she wanted to keep some of these euphoric hooks for herself.
On her debut solo album Mid Air, Romy works with Gibson and Stuart Price, the producer best known for his work on Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, to capture some of the heady magic of those early nightlife experiences. The result is a meticulously crafted homage to the strobe-lit, chart-topping dance music of the 1990s and 2000s—though, at times, it misses some of the tension that made Romy’s songwriting with the xx so vital. Jamie xx reunites with his former bandmate for the ebullient come-up of “Enjoy Your Life,” a Beverly Glenn-Copeland-sampling banger that might also have sounded at home on his own 2015 debut, In Colour. There are thumping Euro-trance homages in the form of “Strong” and “Did I,” where wisps of Romy’s vocals dovetail with acidic synths. Elsewhere, over the mournful Balearic pulse of “The Sea,” her sighs stretch out like glimmers of light on the surface of the Mediterranean.
Romy’s translucent vocals are the connecting thread between the xx’s vulnerable emo-R&B and the dance-pop of Mid Air. They often evoke the rawness of Cassandra Fox or Everything but the Girl‘s Tracey Thorn, carrying a humanity that roughens the glossy sheen of the production behind it. On “Twice,” her voice is sumptuously layered as she urges: “Pull back the covers/Let me feel the warmth of your skin.” It’s at once fragile and strong, her tactile delivery foregrounded over the insistent, choppy beat behind it. In moments like these, simple lines are elevated to something piercingly real. At other points, the record comes off clunky, like on the U-Hauling anthem “Weightless,” where she sings awkwardly of “Bending over backwards/Under my skin” and hurries to fit unwieldy longer phrases into a breath.
