Jamie xx: Real Name, Age and the Story Behind In Colour and In Waves

Jamie xx's real name is James Thomas Smith. He was born on 28 October 1988 in London, which makes him 37 as this goes out, and the "xx" is not a stage alias but a nod to the band that made him, The xx. That one line answers the search, but it does not tell you why anyone still types it. In 2024 Smith returned with In Waves, his first solo album in roughly nine years, and in 2026 he is the named support for all 30 nights of Harry Styles' Madison Square Garden residency. This is the full story behind the name, told with a dancefloor's ear rather than an encyclopedia's, in the same real-name profile series we run on the artists shaping British club music.

Jamie xx at a glance

• Real name: James Thomas Smith.
• Born: 28 October 1988 in London, England. He is 37 as of this piece.
• Also known for: co-founding the London band The xx, alongside Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim.
• Label: Young, the imprint formerly called Young Turks, part of the XL Recordings family.
• First solo project: We're New Here (2011), a full reworking of Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here.
• Debut solo album: In Colour, released 29 May 2015, home to "Loud Places", "Gosh" and "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)".
• Second solo album: In Waves, released 20 September 2024, his first in about nine years, runtime a neat 44:44.
• Awards trail: In Colour took a 2015 Mercury Prize nomination, a 2016 Grammy nomination and two 2016 BRIT nominations, but no wins as a solo artist.
• In Waves reception: 84 out of 100 on Metacritic, UK Albums No. 5, UK Dance Albums No. 1.
• 2026 live: support act for all 30 nights of Harry Styles' "Together, Together" residency at Madison Square Garden, late August through October.
• Official home: jamiexx.com, with an official Bandcamp for releases and dates.

What is Jamie xx's real name?

The short answer is the one most people came for. Jamie xx's real name is James Thomas Smith, born on 28 October 1988 in London. He performs and produces as Jamie xx, and on the day this publishes he is 37, turning 38 at the end of October. It is one of the more ordinary names in dance music, which is part of the point. There is no persona in the letters, no invented mythology, just a producer who kept his own initials and borrowed two more from the band he started.

If you have followed the real-name profile treatment we gave Fred again.., the shape here will feel familiar. A recognisable stage name, a plain birth name behind it, and a much longer story than the SERP one-liner lets on. The difference with Smith is that his stage name is not a solo invention at all. It grew out of a band, and to understand the name you have to understand the band.

Why "xx"? Jamie xx, The xx and how the name works

This is the detail the generic "who is" pages fumble. Jamie xx is not a separate act from The xx. He is one third of it. Smith co-founded The xx in London with Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, and when he stepped out to release music on his own he carried the band's two-letter signature with him, tacking it onto his first name. So The xx is the group, Jamie xx is the solo project, and the same person sits at the centre of both. Readers conflate the two constantly, and it is an easy mistake to make when the branding is deliberately shared.

That shared identity is not a marketing accident, it is the biography. Smith was the producer in The xx, the one building the beats and the low end under Romy and Oliver's vocals, and his solo work reads as that instinct given full room to move. The band's fingerprints never really leave. Romy sings on his best-known solo single, Oliver appears on his debut album, and both return on the 2024 record. When you hear Jamie xx, you are hearing the rhythm section of The xx thinking out loud.

From bedroom producer to Young Turks: the early years, 2011 to 2014

Smith's solo path opened in 2011, and it opened in an unusual way. Rather than a conventional debut, his first solo full-length was We're New Here, a complete reworking of Gil Scott-Heron's final album I'm New Here. Taking the late poet and musician's voice and rebuilding the record around it was a bold opening move for a producer barely out of his own band's debut, and it announced the sampler's ear that would define everything after. The same year brought the early single "Far Nearer / Beat For", the sound of a producer working out what a solo Jamie xx even was.

The reworking instinct got its due in 2012, when Smith won Remixer of the Year at the Music Producers Guild awards. Then came the run that set up his debut album. In 2014 he released "All Under One Roof Raving", a track that pulled UK rave history straight into the present, and on 5 May 2014 the double A-side "Girl" / "Sleep Sound". These were not throwaways. They were the first clear signals that Smith was building something dancefloor-facing under his own name, released through Young Turks, the XL-affiliated label that has housed his solo work throughout. It is the same underground-to-crossover arc that runs through so much British electronic music, the kind of trajectory we traced with another crossover producer who broke big, Barry Can't Swim.

In Colour (2015): "Loud Places", "Gosh" and a Mercury nomination

In Colour arrived on 29 May 2015 through Young Turks, and it is still the album most people mean when they picture Jamie xx. It was built out across the spring by a run of singles that now read like a greatest-hits list. "Loud Places", featuring Romy, came first on 27 March 2015, and Pitchfork named it a Best New Track almost immediately. "Gosh" followed on 4 May, all rave sirens and jungle memory, and "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)", featuring Young Thug and Popcaan, landed on 22 May, a bright, unlikely fusion of London producer, Atlanta rapper and Jamaican dancehall.

The guest list told you how Smith works. Romy appears on "SeeSaw" as well as "Loud Places", Oliver Sim sings "Stranger in a Room", and the Young Thug and Popcaan pairing sits at the record's pop centre. It is a producer's album, stitched from samples and features, and it connected. In Colour debuted at No. 3 on the UK Albums Chart, reached No. 21 on the US Billboard 200 and topped the US Dance/Electronic Albums chart, an unusually strong American showing for a British electronic record.

The recognition piled up from there. In Colour was nominated for the 2015 Mercury Prize, then for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 58th Grammy Awards in 2016, and Smith picked up two BRIT nominations that same year, for British Album of the Year and British Male Solo Artist. He did not win any of them, which is worth stating plainly because plenty of pages imply otherwise. In Colour was a nominated, acclaimed, commercially successful record, not a trophy-winning one, and that gap between reverence and hardware would become a small recurring theme.

The nine-year gap, and what he did with it

Then, for a long time, nothing. Or nothing under his solo name. Roughly nine years passed between In Colour and its follow-up, an eternity in a scene that now expects a new drop every fortnight. The gap is the most interesting thing about Smith's career, and it is the part the name-lookup pages skip entirely.

Speaking to GRAMMY.com around the return, Smith framed the pause as a matter of building a life outside the machine. "I got good at touring and being an artist in my twenties, but I didn't have any room for anything else in my life," he told the publication, adding that he "spent a long time trying to find what else makes me whole." That is not a producer running dry. It is one deliberately stepping off the treadmill, and in an industry that rewards constant output it reads almost as an act of resistance.

The lesson, for anyone grinding, is that a long silence is not the same as an absence. Smith stayed a working DJ throughout, still moved through the world of clubs and festivals, still built the material that would eventually surface. He simply refused to let the album cycle set the pace of his life. When he did return, he told GRAMMY.com it had been "my favorite experience making an album ever," qualifying it immediately: "Even though it's been really hard and it's taken a long time." The record justified the wait.

In Waves (2024): the return, the collaborators, the reception

In Waves was released on 20 September 2024 through Young, the same imprint under its newer name, and it landed with a neat, almost jokey runtime of 44:44. Smith spent the summer trailing it with singles: "Baddy on the Floor" in April, "Treat Each Other Right" in June, "Life" a fortnight later, "All You Children" at the end of July, "Dafodil" in late August and "Waited All Night" two days before release. It was a proper campaign, a producer easing a nine-year absence back into public view one track at a time.

The collaborator sheet reads like a map of Smith's world. Production across the record is credited to The Avalanches, Honey Dijon, Rodaidh McDonald and Luke Solomon alongside Smith himself, and the features run deep: Robyn, Honey Dijon, Panda Bear, Kelsey Lu, John Glacier, the choreographer and performer Oona Doherty, The Avalanches, and of course Romy and Oliver Sim from The xx, with Erykah Badu turning up on a deluxe edition. It is a house-and-dancefloor cast rather than an indie one, a clear signal of where Smith's head was, closer to the world of feel-good dance built for scale, see salute than to the hushed rooms of his band's early records.

Critically it was a triumph. In Waves holds 84 out of 100 on Metacritic, the threshold for "universal acclaim", and it placed high on year-end lists, No. 2 at Variety and No. 6 at Time Out among the best albums of 2024. Commercially it reached No. 5 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 1 on the UK Dance Albums chart, went to No. 2 in Flanders and No. 10 in Australia, and scraped in at No. 146 on the US Billboard 200, a softer American result than In Colour but still a top-five record at home.

And then the awards story repeated itself, in the negative. Despite the acclaim, In Waves did not receive a Best Dance/Electronic Album nomination at the 2025 Grammys, a snub that was widely noted, given the cycle's nominees included Charli xcx, Four Tet, Justice, Zedd and Kaytranada. For a record that critics ranked among the year's best, being left off the list said more about the awards than about the album. Smith remains, on the solo ledger, one of the most respected electronic artists never to win the categories he keeps getting nominated in.

Jamie xx as a DJ: rave samples and dancefloor instincts

Strip away the album accolades and what you are left with is a DJ. That is the version of Smith our readers actually care about, and it is the through-line from "All Under One Roof Raving" to In Waves. His records are built out of dancefloor memory, rave sirens, garage swing, jungle breaks and the collective euphoria of a room going up together, and they work because he is programming them from the booth outwards, not the studio inwards.

He told GRAMMY.com that he knows a track is working almost instantly, that "it's usually a feeling that I get within the first half a day of making a piece of music." That is a DJ's ear, the one that can tell within a few bars whether something will land at 2am. It is the same instinct that runs through the wider Boiler Room world Jamie xx's generation came up through, where a track's worth is settled on the floor rather than the spreadsheet.

His approach to the live show follows from the same principle. Smith told GRAMMY.com he was "really trying to take elements of what I love about playing at intimate shows and inject it into the shows," which is a producer trying to keep the sweat and intimacy of a club night as the rooms get bigger. That tension, between the small dark room and the festival main stage, is one every crossover artist has to solve, and it is the exact terrain we mapped in the sound of expensive clubbing in 2026. Smith's answer is to keep the dancefloor's logic even when the dancefloor becomes an arena.

If you want to place him in the current British electronic landscape, he sits among the artists proving that this music can be emotional and enormous at once. Think of the British electronic artists reshaping the charts, like Nia Archives, or the emotional, festival-sized electronic music à la TSHA. Smith got there first and largely wrote the template, a producer with a sampler's imagination who scaled a niche sound up to stadiums without hollowing it out, in the way that producers who outgrew a scene tag, like Mall Grab, have had to.

Jamie xx in 2026: the Harry Styles Madison Square Garden residency

Which brings us to why the name is trending again in 2026. Smith is the announced support act for all 30 nights of Harry Styles' "Together, Together" residency at Madison Square Garden, a run stretching from late August through late October. It is an enormous booking, thirty consecutive nights in one of the most storied rooms in music, and it puts a London electronic producer in front of a mainstream pop audience night after night.

"Together, Together" is a seven-city global residency, more than fifty performances in total, which launched in Amsterdam in May 2026 with Robyn supporting the Dutch dates. For the New York leg, all thirty of them, the support slot went to Jamie xx. The exact format of his sets each night is not something to overstate, press has confirmed the support billing rather than the precise shape of every show, but the significance is clear enough. Styles could have picked anyone. He picked a producer whose last album was a dancefloor record, and asked him to warm a Manhattan arena thirty times over.

There is a neat symmetry in it, too. Robyn, who opens the Amsterdam nights, also features on In Waves. Smith's residency run overlaps directly with the window this piece publishes into, so if you are reading this in September and wondering whether he is out on the road, the answer is yes, most nights, in New York. For anyone tracking his movements the official site jamiexx.com remains the one to trust, over the ticket-aggregator pages that speculate about dates he has never confirmed.

Beyond the residency, resist the temptation to believe every festival poster with his name on it. A great many 2026 listings for Jamie xx live only on ticket-resale and SEO pages, unconfirmed by him or any promoter. The MSG residency is the one solid, on-the-record commitment, and it is more than enough to explain why "jamie xx real name" is being searched again. When a producer this private steps into a room this public, people want to know exactly who they are watching.

Where Jamie xx fits in the MNEEMO map

Smith belongs to a particular lineage we keep returning to: British electronic producers who came up through clubs, kept one foot on the dancefloor and ended up shaping the wider culture. He is the elder statesman of that group now, the one whose 2015 album gave a generation of festival-facing producers their blueprint. You can hear his influence in the emotional maximalism that runs through so much current UK dance, and you can trace the same real-name-behind-the-project story through another real-name house profile, Chris Stussy.

And for all the arena talk, the roots stay clubbable. The music Smith makes is still, at bottom, meant for a room with a good rig and a crowd that knows when the siren is coming. If In Colour and In Waves send you back out looking for that feeling, our guide to where London actually dances in 2026 is the place to start. That is where his sound was born, and it is where it still lands hardest.

FAQ

What is Jamie xx's real name?

Jamie xx's real name is James Thomas Smith. He performs and produces solo as Jamie xx and is also one third of the London band The xx, alongside Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. The stage name simply pairs his own first name with the band's two-letter signature, rather than being a separate invented alias.

How old is Jamie xx and when was he born?

He was born on 28 October 1988 in London, England, which makes him 37 as of September 2026, turning 38 at the end of October. He is a lifelong Londoner, and both The xx and his solo project were built in the city.

Is Jamie xx the same person as The xx?

Not the same, but closely linked. Jamie xx is James Thomas Smith's solo project. The xx is the three-piece band he co-founded with Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, where he is the producer. So he is one member of The xx and the sole artist behind Jamie xx. Both share the same two-letter branding, which is why people confuse them.

What label is Jamie xx on?

His solo work is released through Young, the imprint historically known as Young Turks, which sits within the XL Recordings family. In Colour came out on Young Turks in 2015, and In Waves came out on Young in 2024. It has been his solo home throughout his career.

What albums has Jamie xx released?

Three solo projects. We're New Here in 2011, a full reworking of Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here, then his debut studio album In Colour in 2015, and In Waves in 2024. In Colour and In Waves are his two proper solo studio albums, with roughly nine years between them.

When did In Waves come out?

In Waves was released on 20 September 2024 through Young. It was his first solo album in about nine years, following In Colour in 2015, and it runs for a deliberately neat 44:44. It reached No. 5 on the UK Albums Chart and topped the UK Dance Albums chart.

What are Jamie xx's biggest songs?

From In Colour: "Loud Places" featuring Romy, "Gosh" and "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" featuring Young Thug and Popcaan. From In Waves: "Baddy on the Floor" and "Life". "Loud Places" remains his best-known solo single and was named a Pitchfork Best New Track on release in 2015.

Has Jamie xx won a Mercury Prize or a Grammy?

No, not as a solo artist. In Colour was nominated for the 2015 Mercury Prize and for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2016 Grammys, and he took two BRIT nominations in 2016, but won none of them. In Waves was widely acclaimed yet missed a Best Dance/Electronic Album nomination at the 2025 Grammys entirely.

Who did Jamie xx work with on In Waves?

The features and production credits include Robyn, Honey Dijon, The Avalanches, Panda Bear, Kelsey Lu, John Glacier, Oona Doherty, and his bandmates Romy and Oliver Sim, with Erykah Badu on a deluxe edition. Production is credited across the record to The Avalanches, Honey Dijon, Rodaidh McDonald, Luke Solomon and Smith himself.

Is Jamie xx touring in 2026?

Yes. He is the announced support act for all 30 nights of Harry Styles' "Together, Together" residency at Madison Square Garden, running from late August through October 2026. It is part of a seven-city global residency of more than fifty shows. For confirmed dates, check his official site, jamiexx.com, rather than ticket-resale pages.

Facts in this piece were checked against current sources in August 2026. If something has moved since, that is the nature of a living scene.