There is nothing quite like hearing a band so compelling, so exciting and so directly brilliant for the first time that you can't leave them alone, can't shake them and are left virtually paralysed to do anything else…. So having taken an enforced 24-hour break from The xx's MySpace page after stumbling upon it in late 2008 to gain some perspective on whether a band with only a handful of demos can sound so dangerously sexy, the answer was that the Southwest Londoners overwhelmingly could.
The four-piece's stripped-down sound - the type that broods as much as it grooves - subsequently and gradually swept others aside over the course of 2009 and their debut XX went far beyond merely proving their potential when released in August of that year.
A bandmate of Sufjan Stevens when both were starting their miscal career in Holland, Michigan, Shannon Stephens was the lead vocalist of Mazuki - named after Sufjan's brother the professional long distance runner Marzuki Stevens - when they released two albums in the later 90's. Shannon's self-titled debut - produced by Sufjan and fellow former Marzuki man Matt Haseltine - emerged in 2000 but was re-released by Asthmatic Kitty eight years later after, the same year Bonnie Prince Billy included a cover of closer \I'll Be Glad' on his Lie Down In The Light record. After taking that period to begin raising a family - Shannon relocated to Seattle where she has a young daughter - she returned with the nine-years-in-the-waiting second album The Breadwinner in September 2009.
