Romy Madley Croft didn’t set out to make a solo record. “I love The xx and I’ve always been content in a band,” she told Kyle Meredith. “It’s not like I had a secret master plan to go solo.” But after a decade of hushed intimacy and shadowy restraint, the songs kept piling up — songs she initially thought she’d hand over to someone else. “People said, ‘This sounds quite personal to you. You sure you want to give it away?’”
The result is “Lifetime,” her first official solo single. It’s not the fragile bedroom melancholy of The xx. It’s a club track, bright and euphoric, with more daylight than her band has ever allowed. “I’ve mainly written songs about being heartbroken in my life,” she admitted. “It’s more challenging to write a song about being happy — without it being overly saccharine.”
But lockdown gave her the push. Stuck in her house in England, she found herself craving motion. “I was closing my eyes and imagining being in a car with my hands in the air. That fizzy teenage feeling. And lyrically I was just thinking, if the world ends, I want to be with the people I love.”
It’s a far cry from the shy teenager who once scribbled poems in notebooks and only showed them to her two best friends. In fact, Romy’s whole detour into pop came by accident. She wanted to learn how pop music worked, so she flew to L.A. and threw herself into writing rooms with strangers. “People would start playing music and just say, ‘Sing!’ and I completely panicked,” she said. “It was good for me though. I learned a lot on the go.”
One of those experiments turned into “Electricity,” the Grammy-winning Dua Lipa / Silk City banger she co-wrote. “Mark Ronson played me an instrumental with Diana Gordon’s melodies, no words, and I suddenly heard this whole story in it,” Romy recalled. “I thought it kind of sounded like she was saying ‘electricity.’ That one word unlocked the song.”
She laughs about how Sia once told her the same trick: pick a word and just build. “You can hear that in her music. She was very generous with her advice, and it works for her very well.”
But “Electricity” also proved something bigger: that Romy could write outside The xx and outside herself. And eventually she stopped wanting to give those songs away. “One day I said to my producer, ‘Maybe you’ll write for me,’ and that was the start of a new chapter,” she said. That producer, Fred again.., is now her closest collaborator, co-piloting the solo record.
For now she’s keeping details vague — how far along, when it’ll be out — but she’s clear about the vibe: “You can expect more upbeat, more clubby influences. Songs people can put on and dance to. That’s kind of new for me.”
Still, Romy insists this isn’t some break-up with her bandmates. The xx are writing in their own corner, slowly, at their own pace. Jamie xx has his orbit, Oliver Sim has his, and Romy is finally comfortable in hers. “It took me a while to get here. But it feels good now.”
And if you’re surprised to hear The xx’s high priestess of melancholy finally finding euphoria? That’s exactly the point.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
