Xiu Xiu - There has been beauty in everything

In most cases, the music of Xiu Xiu limits its expressive space, so to speak, to the psychic realm. There's no opening to the outside world, understood as an imaginary of shared or individual places. Theirs is a fruit salad of noise, electronics, folk, new wave that thus lives an autonomous life.
The arsenal of Jamie Stewart and his cohorts includes various keyboards, guitars and bass (more rarely), but also a jumble of rattles and instruments, which each time find the opportunity to seem at odds with one another, in an expressionist triumph where the meeting of sounds often resembles a dialogue between the deaf; all of this must provide the ideal backdrop for Stewart's breathless, paranoid performance - an absolute showman, yet one capable of a gift for restraint and silence that avoids the overexposure a voice like his might otherwise fall into.
Listening to Xiu Xiu records hurts. It's that kind of psychological transfer whereby the artist's torments, suffering and despair are transplanted onto the listener, onto a listening experience that becomes all-consuming, almost unbearable in how actively it draws you into the unfolding of the artistic performance.

Do you know the way to San José?

It all began (unexpectedly) in sunny San José, California (though later stops in Washington, and especially Seattle, would follow).
Having already played together in bands like IBOPA and Ten In The Swear Jar, Jamie Stewart (vocals) and Cory McCulloch (bass) gathered some friends, including Lauren Andrews and Yvonne Chen (keyboards), to form a new group.
The project was born in 2000 under the enigmatic moniker Xiu Xiu (pronounced "shoo-shoo"), inspired by the 1998 Chinese film "Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl", directed by Joan Chen. Jamie Stewart, a vocalist of ambiguous, desperate charisma, is its central pivot and will remain its only permanent member.
An ensemble perpetually "in progress", Xiu Xiu would go through an inexhaustible turnover of members, including people who passed through Deerhoof, Mr. Bungle, and The Dead Science. This continued up to the current line-up, which sees Stewart joined by his cousin Caralee McElroy and experimental musician Ches Smith.

Having landed a deal with the "legendary" indie label 5 Rue Christine, Xiu Xiu prepared for their full-length debut. And it was an instant shock.
The eleven tracks on Knife Play (2002) clearly reveal the San José quartet's "noble" reference points: theirs is an unimaginable crossover between the unsettling synths of Suicide and New Order, fronted by a singer steeped in the darkest obsessions of Mark Hollis and Ian Curtis, where instead of guitars (an almost impalpable presence) room is made for synthesizers, horns, harmonium, mandolin, and so on. It would be wrong, however, to call this a carbon copy of those names - rather, it's a wholehearted devotion to those bands' attitude.
The songs, built on a perpetually dark, tense foundation thanks to icy synth patterns, blend perfectly with Jamie Stewart's vocals, which slip magnificently into the role of the dissociated, with moments ranging from the (apparent) calm of "Homonculus" to the chilling nervous breakdowns worthy of Suicide (the screams of "I Broke Up" sound like they come straight out of "Frankie Teardrop"), echoes of what New Order might have sounded like with Ian Curtis on vocals ("Poe Poe"), and Talk Talk turned electro ("Suha"), while the opening "Don Biasco" is almost the manifesto of their crooked, paranoid electro-noise.
So with Xiu Xiu too, one can look to new wave, that immense attic from which the most disparate bands keep rummaging endlessly - for the metallic, dissonant percussion, the obsessive electronics that veer into industrial, cacophonous territory, and for Jamie Stewart's voice, forever neurotic and desperate. Some have compared it to Mark Hollis's for its ability to express pain and for the chiaroscuro of its timbre, but the differences between the two are far from trivial, and they go beyond mere musical backdrop. While both live through pain, Hollis manages to sublimate it through spirituality and an elevation toward something that, if it doesn't purify, at least grants some kind of salvation; Stewart, on the other hand, sings the pain of someone trapped in desolation and unfulfilled hope. Hollis sees a light ahead of him above; Stewart sees many lights flicker on and off without ever giving him respite, leaving him alone with his paranoia and sarcasm as his only means of survival.

The five songs on the EP Chapel Of The Chimes (Absolutely Kosher, 2002) renew their claustrophobic, paranoid approach. Besides the anguished cover of New Order's "Ceremony", Stewart alternates between swooning ballads ("I Am The Center Of Your World", for piano and percussion) and fits of rage (the theatrical epilepsy of "Jennifer Lopez"), while "Ten-Thousand-Times-A-Minute" and "King Eart, King Heart" settle into hazier, more evanescent atmospheres - no less anguished, though - amid electronic hisses, synth drones and distant clangs.

2002, a year full of artistic satisfaction, ended tragically for Jamie, however: his father, Michael Stewart, formerly singer of We Five (a '60s folk-rock group), took his own life, plunging him into the deepest despair.
Xiu Xiu's activity, however, did not stop - if anything, it became ever more prolific.

Without McCulloch, who temporarily left the project, the band settled into a trio, with Stewart playing an ever more central role, the true nucleus drawing the listener's attention. A role reprised even more emphatically on the new album A Promise (2003).
The opening track "Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl", however, gives us an unprecedented Stewart, accompanied by guitar for a memorable ballad that's only torn apart by synth blades toward the end. The hysteria generated by the shrieking keyboards and percussion, now pounding obsessively in industrial style, offers a variety of oddities reminiscent of This Heat's rhythms, and serves as the backdrop for Stewart's theatrical declamation.
"Sad Redux-O-Grapher" and "Brooklyn Dodgers", also thanks to the strings, add a broader space to the band's usual portrayals, as if seeking some opening to the outside world. This isn't, however, a claim to universality - the anguish remains folded in on itself, and the closing tracks prove it: the cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car", stripped down to the bone with whispered vocals, and the closing track "Ian Curtis Wishlist", a tribute to the Joy Division frontman, but also a statement of intent: Stewart doesn't want to come to terms with himself, but is probably lucky enough to live in an era disenchanted enough to spare him the search for the absolute end.

On tour to promote the album, Xiu Xiu are robbed of their electronic equipment and computers. So Stewart decides to go back into the studio to record a mostly acoustic mini-CD with the explicit title F... Patrol, released in a run of just a thousand copies.
Sparse and searing, the record offers only two new tracks: the opening "Helsabot", a folk number for acoustic guitar and insinuating voice, and the closing "Nieces Pieces", a sinister dirge intoned over a thin layer of strings. The rest of the tracklist contains reworkings of already released songs: "Dr Troll" and "I Broke Up" from Knife Play, "King Earth", "King Earth" and "Jennifer Lopez" from Chapel Of The Chimes, "20,000 Deaths For Eidelyn Gonzales 20,000 Deaths for Jamie Peterson", "Brooklyn Dodgers" and a cover of "Asleep" by the Smiths from A Promise.

Muscle and ghosts

With their third official album in three years, Fabulous Muscles (2004), Xiu Xiu square the circle. After a sensational debut, a fascinating but perhaps overly solipsistic second LP, and a couple of EPs that hinted at new and interesting directions, here finally is the record that can win everyone over.
The sonic and expressive range is broader than before. And while we can't quite call it trust, at least we're not in the absolute solipsism of the previous album.
The opening impact is explosive: "Crank Heart", cybernetic and eccentric, with its lopsided rhythm, acidic synths and a chorus fired off at top speed, recalls the opening of "Don Biasco". Jamie Stewart stands as domineering protagonist, with a taut, nervous voice, on "I Luv The Valley OH", a distillation of new wave. Skeletal ballads (the title track, for instance, delicate and touching) alternate with no apparent logic alongside hallucinated, hyperkinetic synth-pop like "Brian The Vampire", with sounds pushed to the brink of paroxysm. The tone of the songs is dictated by the leader, a Jamie Stewart as towering as he is fragile: stunned in the face of the catalepsy of "Little Panda McEllroy", we then find ourselves in the desolate landscape of "Support Our Troops", where alien, screeching sounds drag wearily along, conversing with one another in tired dynamics, acting as a prelude to the final sonic catastrophe.
"Clowne Towne", essentially a bitter ballad, has a melodic opening that lets in a glimmer of light; but those colors fade out in the closing "Mike", a possible dying-man's soundtrack for a broken man, where every guitar hit is a bloody lash, and the out-of-sync percussion and tragic, obsessive keyboards give the merciless but necessary push to a hopeless walk. It is perhaps their idea of a requiem, their own "Decades", reminding us that we can at least try to fill the abyss of despair with beauty.

In 2005, the Italian label Xeng released a collection of songs recorded live during the second half of 2003, Life And Live. The tracks show Stewart accompanying himself alone on guitar or alongside the discreet presence of the rest of the band, which at the time performed as a trio; alongside Stewart himself we find Devin Hoff and the faithful Cory McCulloch (also the album's producer), though it's worth noting that the name of Devendra Banhart also appears in the credits.
The 15 tracks, two of them presented in double form, show the band's more singer-songwriter side, and Jamie Stewart's voice is a continuous gut-punch. "20,000 Deaths For Eidelyn Gonzales, 20,000 Deaths For Jamie Peterson" opens the record, but a second version, even more tremulous and neurotic, appears at the album's center. The peaks of intensity can be found in a fantastic version of "Sad Pony Guerrilla", where we find ourselves chasing a Stewart on the verge of emotional collapse, the dragging, drunken "Nieces Pieces", and the previously unreleased "Clover", a dramatic, scratchy ballad. The rest of the material is drawn from songs on the band's first two albums, or from the EP Fag Patrol, of which Life And Live can be considered an expansion.
Jamie Stewart's inner turmoil is expressed here in its most musically jagged and bare-boned form, and for that reason perhaps the most effective and authentic, making this album an indispensable compendium in that sense, a sharp snapshot of a troubled personality, seemingly curled in on itself, yet capable of becoming a totem whose eyes seem to stare inescapably into the listener's own.

And the ghosts besieging Jamie Stewart's mind have still not been exorcised, if it's true that the next album, the fourth chapter in the long haul, is yet another descent into hell.
La Foret (2005) is a liposuction of the blues' connective tissue, re-presented in an extremely stylized, involuted mimesis — the only one possible in a 2000s dominated by digital aesthetics, by harmless tapered forms that hide their substance, by cultural models that dumb everything down.
Stewart brings us back once again to the primal origin of the artistic gesture, to the absolute sincerity of his being a medium for an intimate way of feeling. He does so, however, while using forms that highlight his indissoluble bond with the times he is a product of.
And so come the synths, the electronics, the guitars that recover a shred of humanity in a dehumanized present, with sounds that flow fast and neurotic, with pauses and slowdowns signaling a will to stop and reflect. Stewart screams and thrashes about, misunderstood ("Muppet Face"), channels instincts of death and desolation ("Pox"), renders his own personal interpretation of the aesthetics of noise ("Saturn").
Onward to the second, more reflective, almost introverted part, with the nursery rhyme "Baby Captain" acting as a watershed, with "Rose Of Sharon", a mass sung by a possessed preacher, and the industrial syncopations of "Yellow Raspberry" closing yet another act of pain.

Ciautistico! (Important, 2005), credited to XXL, is a collaboration with Larsen, the Turin duo responsible for a myriad of albums straddling drone-music and avant-rock. A meeting at a Jarboe concert, followed by frequent contact and an exchange of ideas, laid the groundwork for a classic band-meets-band project.
The album (whose title is a pun on "ciao" and "autistico", i.e. "autistic") manages to blend the different attitudes of the musicians involved rather well, with Stewart carving out for himself essentially just the role of performer, managing to pull off a few theater-of-the-absurd numbers — the dramatic "(Pokey in Your) Gnocchi", the more relaxed "Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw" — and casting a spectral light on Adam & The Ants' old "Prince Charming".
Larsen, on the other hand, excel above all on the instrumentals ("Distorted Duck", "Sunday"), poised between ambient music and celestial raptures in the vein of Talk Talk.
Other tracks, however, come across as overambitious experiments ("Lipstick Fair") or little more than divertissements ("Minnie Mouseistic", with its broken, macaronic Italian).
Overall, though, a successful hybrid — one that would indeed get a sequel.

An uncertain renewal

While odd rumors circulate about an alleged "pop turn" for Xiu Xiu, The Air Forces (2006) arrives to dispel any doubt: the Californian band's signature sound is as recognizable as ever. It's not, however, a banal or entirely predictable record: some new directions have been sought, especially compared to their most recent work. Not in formal polish, nor in a catchier production, but rather in greater attention to melody and rhythm, even though the usual clashes between metallic, screeching sounds still pop up like pistons at more or less regular intervals. The overall mood, though, is slightly more relaxed than in the past, so a track like "Hello From Eau Claire" doesn't feel out of place, a simple, graceful nursery rhyme entrusted to the voice of longtime partner-in-crime Cory McCulloch.
Lending Stewart a hand now are his cousin Caralee McElroy and experimental percussionist Ches Smith. The San José singer's voice, however, remains the central pivot: it manages, as always, to express a miraculous balance of suffering, dignity, desolation and fragility, evident right from the opening skeletal "Buzz Saw", confirmed again in faster, tighter tracks like "Vulture Piano", and at its best in the beautiful, delicate "P. F. In The Streets Of London", one of the finest ballads the band has ever played, as well as in "Watermelon Vs. Pineapple", which is practically a potential "indie" ballad.
There's no shortage of wave-tinged, chaotic and intense tracks, like "Boy Soprano" and "Save Me", which reflect the album's overall livelier tone; the cryptic moments come in an instrumental interlude like "Bishop, CA", and in the closing, desolate and melancholy suburban landscape of "Wig Master".
Yet another confirmation of a unique style in years that have been somewhat short on novelty.

2006 also saw the release of a covers EP (Tu Mi Piaci) and a 7-inch picture disc featuring photos by David Horvitz.

Meanwhile, Stewart keeps pursuing other paths too. Like XXL, the strange Xiu Xiu-Larsen pairing which, two years after Ciautistico!, returns in 2007 with Spicchiology?. Thirty-nine minutes riding waves of airy, broad, sun-drenched melodies. The long spectral digressions that are Larsen's trademark are set aside here, save for the penultimate track "...Nothing About Dwarves?", in favor of a pop as refined as it is cerebral.
A continuous, homogeneous flow of different sounds carves out long waves that struggle to break on the shore, along with impetuous crests that rise up suddenly and crash back down on themselves. Hence the steep electro-tribal-tzigane bends of "King Of Koalas", which ends in a whirling flow of keyboards and breathless gasps, or the funereal industrial atmospheres of "The Green Count Tapes", which seem to have been dropped from above by Throbbing Gristle.
Bringing back a bucolic atmosphere are "Last In The Society", a colorful watercolor poised between Parenthetical Girls and Notwist, or that emblematic electro-pop manifesto going by the name of "Little Mouse Of the Favelas". And while the more liquid, pop side of Mouse On Mars is echoed in "Daydrinking", the ten minutes of "The Tale Of Brother Cakes and Sugar Dust" cut through the atmosphere, between gothic nods and wave reverb, ideally closing the album with an anthology-worthy finale, perpetually and constantly balanced between noise and dream-pop.

The double Remixed & Covered (2007) is a kind of extended celebration (80 minutes) of Xiu Xiu, with 18 tracks taken up, reworked or completely overhauled at the mixing desk by friends and admirers. Standing out above all are Devendra Banhart's "Support Our Troops" and Marissa Nadler's skeletal "Clowne Town", but in the end the real gem is an Xiu Xiu cover (the New Order-esque "Ceremony"). A record for fans, in any case, that adds nothing to the band's catalog.

If The Air Force had been only half an Xiu Xiu record — still instantly recognizable as always, but lacking the evolutionary drive that made all their other albums unique — Women As Lovers (2008) marks the return of that need to push further, both emotionally and compositionally.
Withdrawn, contrary, disturbing; yet at the same time steeped in an almost soul-like aura, starting with the melody of the single "I Do What I Want, When I Want", sunny, if it weren't hummed under one's breath, awkwardly and off the beat. The new direction explodes on "You Are Pregnant, You Are Dead", veering into white r&b territory over taut percussive rhythms; on the cover of "Under Pressure", its sound far cleaner than usual and even sporting a jaunty (if admittedly off-key) horn invasion; and on the open folk of "F.T.W.", whose ending strays into Books territory.
There's no shortage of more familiar numbers, like the dark-folk of "Black Keyboards" or the furious rock-wave of "In Lust You Can Hear The Axe Fall" and "White Nerd"; but Stewart's head is elsewhere. The excellent "No Friend Oh!" is a bastard pop song: taut guitars, horns, bells and electronic disturbances; the unsettling whistling of "Child At Arms" paves the way toward still other roads.
But the new developments, with a few exceptions, still sound not quite mastered; the old ones often seem merely obligatory. This isn't meant to cast the now sixth Xiu Xiu album in a negative light, especially when it's capable of delivering gripping closing statements like "Gayle Lynn", but the impression remains that this is the band's least focused record. A partial misstep, in other words, that casts some shadow over the prospects of a project that, for better or worse, has defined nearly a decade of indie-rock.

In 2010 came Dear God, I Hate Myself, the eighth effort from the Xiu Xiu project, which had in the meantime lost Caralee McElroy (now stationed in Cold Cave). Stewart's songwriting shows itself to be far more structured, more evolved and geared toward pure, hard song-form.
The album opens with the rotten quagmire of "Gray Death", between an acoustic guitar cranked up to the nth degree and sudden, caustic electronic gusts. Next comes the gorgeous single "Chocolate Makes You Happy", driven by a bone-dry rhythm section, xylophone and gentle frictions in a vaguely shoegaze vein. Passing through minimal-synth skeletons ("House Sparrow"), blindfolded electronic spasms ("Secret Motel") and joyful dedications ("The Fabrizio Palumbo Retailation", a track dedicated to one of the members of Larsen, as well as their promoter in Italy and half of the XXL project), one gets the impression this is just another typical Xiu Xiu record, an anemic art-pop with less "art-" and a lot more pop. And yet it only takes a moment's distraction to stumble upon a genuine dark pearl: "Hyunhye's Theme", a jarring ballad with a warped gypsy flavor, with mutant strings framing the acoustic guitar. And how can one not mention the title track too, suspended between the melody of Stewart's vocals (never so sweet) and filthy blasts of noise.
In several places it's clear that Stewart, thanks to greater attention to detail and a precise dosage of emotion, has crossed a line — the one dividing art and the popular — giving birth to a record that is accomplished, fun and mature.

So don't expect revolutionary masterpieces or extremism from future Xiu Xiu releases, just the most honest pop-rock craftsmanship.

Always, their first album for Bella Union, is indeed a continuation of Stewart's descent into a sophisticated yet reactionary revivalism. His expressionist theatrics are by now reduced to danceable cadences with heavy-handed sounds and assorted embellishments ("Born To Suffer"), and his instinctive ego swings wildly from memories of the past to crises of identity, even to fashionable vanities. The contributions of Carla Bozulich, who does duet with the frontman on one track, could hardly be less influential.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom arrives in February 2014, the band's ninth studio album, inspired by a Japanese porn film from 1979. The most evident difference compared to Always is largely aesthetic: Angel Guts relies almost exclusively on analogue synths and drum machines, sounding more fragile and skeletal, partly because the guitar is practically absent. But it's precisely this approach that makes the album far more abrasive and cutting than its predecessor, dispelling once and for all any suspicion that the American band might be veering toward popular music.
From the record's very opening we're dragged deep into yet another endless odyssey. An icy wind pushes us into a hell of tears and metal, made this time of concrete, calibrated, direct songs that rarely run past the four-minute mark, in which Stewart spits out all his pain with little beating around the bush. The airy, geometric, Depeche-Mode-inflected electro-pop of "Archie's Fades" and the pulsing, endless beats of "Stupid In The Dark" manage to stay coherent and sharply focused, without entirely losing the distinctive traits of the Xiu Xiu sound, always poised between Suicide and Einstürzende Neubauten. The voice of the minstrel of death creeps forward amid the synths with great naturalness, balancing, as always, desolation and sadness (as in the bare "New Life Immigration") with terrifying, neurotic ravings one step from madness: in this sense, the bells of "El Naco" sound like the prelude to a funeral in which a harrowing, harrowed Stewart screams in our face what we probably never wanted to hear.
The listen continues, moving from the diseased jungle of "Adult Friends" to the industrial echoes of "The Silver Platter" and "A Knife In The Sun", arriving at the pure horror of "Cinthya's Unisex" and ending its run in the all-consuming redemption of "Botanica De Los Angeles".

What came after Angel Guts was a perfect example of the band's unpredictability: among other things, a collection of spirituals and field recordings titled "Unclouded Sky", released for Record Store Day 2014, the "Respectful & Clean" cassette, a long excursion into field recordings such as "Tired Of Your World... Peru" (2015), an album played entirely with vibrators titled "Kling Klang" (2015), and finally a partial reinterpretation of the soundtrack Angelo Badalamenti composed for "Twin Peaks", the cult 1990-1991 TV series, titled Plays The Music Of Twin Peaks.
The music of "Twin Peaks" found in its fusion of unease and beauty a surreal dimension, a unique ambiguity that pairs well with the visionary art of David Lynch. What was merely suggested in the originals is here laid bare. The colour palette is more intense, elegance gives way to violence or desolation. The more romantic aspects of the originals are set aside in favour of a greater pull toward the gloomy, the deafening and the bleak. The smooth component disappears in favour of dark-ambient carpets and noise assaults. The band draws out the most unsettling aspects of that music without entirely erasing its ambiguity.
The opening, dreamy "Laura Palmer's Theme" thus becomes a tenser but no less poignant version of its classic original. The whisper of "Into The Night" is wrapped in noise fumes, while the melancholic voice here is ghostly and uneasy. The smooth jazz of "Audrey's Theme" is propelled by galactic arpeggiators, while the tension of "Packards' Vibration" becomes the pretext for a cacophonous blast. "Sycamore Tree" slides from the desolation of the original to the anguish of this new incarnation. The otherworldly "Harold's Theme" becomes a magical, touching, desperate lament for piano and noisy debris. "Dance Of The Dream Man", once hushed, tense jazz, finds a new identity marked by a deafening coda of pure noise-rock. "Falling", the sung version of the famous opening theme, is the album's little gem: a distorted ballad that combines the vibrant emotionality of Arcade Fire with the symphonic grandeur of enveloping noise.
The eardrum-splitting blues-rock of "Blue Frank/Pink Moon" sounds more predictable, while the dark-ambient moments of "Nightsea Wind" and "Love Them Farewell" drift into excess, retaining the slowness that was once Badalamenti's trademark within a decidedly harsher sonic context. To close, "Josie's Past" delivers an unsettling, nearly 8-minute dialogue that recalls the anguished confessions of Suicide and puts the listener through a real test.
A bold operation on Xiu Xiu's part, one that lets us reimagine classics and look with fresh eyes at music we already know and love, while also sounding like a tribute to the unforgettable imagery David Lynch managed to create.

After collaborating once more with Lawrence English on Lynch's behalf for the HEXA project, Jamie Stewart and his Xiu Xiu (still flanked by the trusty Angela Seo and Shayna Dunkelman) set off again with Forget (2017). We're once again, more than ever, at the height of electronic-pop excess. It falls to a frontman's vocals — which vampirise everything in sight and give the listen no real push — to rouse the album's melodic muddles, recalling the band's new-wave roots ("Jenny GoGo", "Forget"). The only properly musical numbers are "Hay Choco Bananas", genuinely spectral, and the slow salsa of "Get Up", one of his existential laments. Backed by a regiment of old and new talents, it's an unhappy amalgam of fashion and psychology that fails on multiple levels, also due to John Congleton's mediocre production: the experimentation of the early days has withered into little sins of eccentricity.

Crossing imaginative sonic landscapes populated by little mice in the favelas and Krampus (just to name a couple of examples), XXL show with every release an inexhaustible urge to push ever further. A creativity reaffirmed to the nth degree with their new creation: Puff O'Gigio, a mythological being fusing Topo Gigio and the Smurfs. XXL: that is, the union of Xiu Xiu and Larsen. The never-settled Jamie Stewart alongside our homegrown excellence, who between records never miss a chance to collaborate with the likes of Jarboe, Nurse with Wound and Michael Gira, producer of the gorgeous "Rever" from 2002. The album's forty minutes are the result of a single week of jams at the O.F.F. Studio in Turin back in 2016. The title at first evokes cartoons and childhood: a legitimate suggestion given the "Cartonianimalettimatti" sound design signed by Larsen, but within the XXL visual-harmonic universe there is far more complexity and fusion of unthinkable opposites.
"Ghost Maid" is a gripping opener: keyboards, guitar and drums fused to perfection, joined by Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo intent on narrating the deeds of the ghostly household entity. With ambient/drone spaces more limited than on previous records and more rhythmic passages like "Lemoning", this childlike, sci-fi post-rock galaxy gently invites us to touch down on the notes of "Welcome To My Planet", enveloped by the grim cloud of whispers, noises and chants that follows.
A pulsing drumbeat heralds an interference coming from "Carissimo", an alien version of Kid A by Radiohead: though the fruit of a brief encounter, listen after listen (ideally on headphones), all the musical layers of the tracks and the many protagonists of "Puff O'Gigio" come to the surface. From great Italian artist Carol Rama, for one of the album's most hypnotic moments, to Polar Bear and its attendant dark boogie, up to the grand finale of "Queen Of Koala", the female mirror of the Koala King from "Spicchiology?": a swelling vortex of sounds, pulsations, solos and distortions, with which XXL confirm themselves as one of the most successful and compelling collaborations on today's musical scene.

Ignore grief

Girl With Basket Of Fruit is the new chapter in the Xiu Xiu saga, arriving in February 2019. Fresh off the positive reception of "Puff O'Gigio", James Stewart returns to his main project, bringing its most disturbing aspects back to the fore. The first clue is the cover, depicting the sigil used to summon Vetis, the demon who promises life. Yet the title suggests a different reference image. The Californian musician reshapes Caravaggio's masterpiece to confront the struggles of being a woman today. As he himself has stated, the concept is female martyrdom: material capable of unleashing a dark tide of obsessions, stories, images and thoughts, hurled at the listener in a destabilising way. The title track sketches the bulk of the nightmare: bursts of convulsive sound, ragged screams, hammering percussion and Stewart's eruption like a runaway train barely held to the rails. Co-produced by the duo Angela Seo & Greg Saunier of Deerhoof and performed alongside Thor Harris (Swans) and Jordan Geiger, the tracks feature grim industrial machine-gun fire fused with the cacophonous tears that are Xiu Xiu's trademark, all dominated by the voice of the Los Angeles artist, the true star instrument. Whether part of a collage ("Ice Cream Truck") or clinging to the maniacal rhythms of "It Comes Out Like A Joke" and "Scisssssssors", it's her voice that's the thread running through Girl With Basket Of Fruit.
Musically speaking, "Pumpkin Attack On Mommy And Daddy" is the most interesting moment: phrases and words as pure sonic building blocks combined with a techno pulse, a gripping delirium captured in a fitting video.
"Amargi Ve Moo" pairs Turkish feminists with the nickname of Stewart's sister: cradled by leaden double bass, it delivers the heartfelt account of her battle/martyrdom against cancer. After the evocative "The Wrong Thing", "Mary Turner Mary Turner" establishes itself as the album's cornerstone. Every second lands like a blow, compounded by the grand guignol chronicle — think of the fate of the child still in Mary's womb — of the lynching that took place in Brooks County, Georgia, against the girl and her husband Hazel. Mournful and bare is the closing ballad "Normal Love", where Stewart duets with old acquaintance Eugene Robinson of Oxbow. With Girl With Basket Of Fruit, James Stewart continues to probe the dark corners of his mind and soul. Love it or hate it, but for now, it's still worth the suffering.

After the martyrdom of women, an inner, personal martyrdom. If the previous record centred on the traumas endured by the female world, Xiu Xiu's new Oh No (2021) bears the marks of Stewart's own mental health struggles; shortly after the 2019 album's release, he shared on social media the need to cancel the tour and regain his balance. A delicate private dynamic compounded by the global drama of Covid-19.
Written, as usual, in Los Angeles, safe — and partly confined — within his own four walls, between 2019 and the following year, Oh No finds Stewart flanked by the now-permanent Angela Seo (also producer and director of the always entertaining videos), with the valuable presence of Lawrence English and Greg Saunier of Deerhoof. Tellingly, Stewart chose to mark a period of closing himself off from the world with a collaborative record, where every song is a duet with another artist. Colleagues and friends who, besides renewing the artist's faith in music, helped broker a truce between the singer and the demons that have always defined his work.
Fifteen tracks, as many guests, and plenty of listens needed to take them all in. Jamie Stewart's voice is, as ever, a whisper charged with pathos, a vocally fragile telling of far more intense lyrics. It opens with "Sad Mezcalita" alongside Sharon Van Etten, a poignant guitar exchange over a mournful backdrop. The same atmosphere, but woven on piano keys, colours "I Cannot Resist", featuring Deb Demure of Drab Majesty, followed by "The Grifters" with Haley Fohr (Circuit Des Yeux), whose lyrical performance tells of a broken friendship. Briefly interrupting the run of duets between Stewart and female guests, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof himself appears on "Goodbye For Good". For the title track, artist and director Susanne Sachsse steps in — the band had already collaborated with her on the performance piece "Original sin. A concert" — contributing in German to a synthetic track swollen with samples. Obsessive repetitions, rhythms and dissonances mark "Rumpus Room" (with Angus Andrew of Liars) and "Fuzz Gong Fight" with Angela Seo. After "I Dream Of Someone Else Entirely" (with composer Owen Pallett) comes one of the album's standout moments: a cover of "One Hundred Years" by the Cure, sung with the queen of darkness Chelsea Wolfe, even more obsessive and relentless than the original. There's also a touch of Italy with "A Classic Screw", featuring Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo of Larsen, already Stewart's partner-in-arms on the XXL project. At the close, Los Angeles punk legend Alice Bag appears ("Knock Out"), along with the record's most melodic passage, chosen as the lead single, "A Bottle Of Rum", with Liz Harris aka Grouper. Closed by Valerie Diaz's brief final message imprinted on "ANTS", Oh No is yet another uncompromising album, where pain and beauty coexist in that balance which Stewart is not only the architect of, but also the leading protagonist.

Praised for his intense solo Rome show at Industrie Fluviali, Jamie Stewart updates the discography branded XX with Ignore grief (2023). The duets format of "Oh No" expands further: right-hand woman Angela Seo sings half the tracks on offer (and once again directs a video, this time for lead single "Maybae Baeby"). A grief shared between the "teenager tragedy songs" intoned by Stewart's hushed voice and Seo's more experimental tracks. The latter deliver the band's punctual, crushing sonic impact, built on cold, metallic, tribal percussion. Stewart, meanwhile, moves between orchestral screeches and sinister piano tolling. Slotting in between them is drummer David Kendrick, former member of Devo and Gleaming Spires, and in the past a session player for Sparks. Frame established, "Ignore grief" is yet another portrait of suffering and horror. The lyrics are flashes from a crime scene, bursts of light onto nightmares made of addiction, prostitution ("Brothel Creeper") and ruined lives. And though the band has stated that half the tracks are real and the other half imagined, in Xiu Xiu's world that line is truly thin: the blows all land, always, and the dark, deviant musical setting lends the same black aura to every track. "The Real Chaos Cha Cha Cha" is the classic obsessive, unsettling intro, with Angela Seo's voice arriving like an announcer from the land of the dead. Despite some less successful passages, like the flimsy "666 Photos of Nothing", the convincing moments are in keeping with the band's most extreme output/reputation: the incessant screams of "Maybae Baeby", "Tarsier, Tarsier, Tarsier, Tarsier", the evocative night-time scenes with that noir breath of "Pahrump", right up to "Border Factory", the most engaging track here. Closing the circle is "For M", a slow, inevitable requiem for this parade of pain impossible to ignore.

Enough darkness. That impenetrable black used for grief, for mourning. Now the setting shifts from crime scenes scattered across Los Angeles to Berlin. With "13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips, colour returns, along with that logo built around the X, forged after a famous Italian-made knife. And movement arrives too. Yes, because after intense, musically devastating records, Jamie Stewart — joined by Angela Seo and David Kendrick — presents with "13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips the most accessible, danceable record in recent Xiu Xiu history. Accessible but not frivolous, without betraying the project's iconoclastic nature. Not that such moments were entirely absent in the recent past. Think of "Pumpkin Attack On Mommy And Daddy" (Girl With Basket Of Fruit): but those tracks were embedded within complex, painful themes.
"13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips instead stays consistent within the same sonic dimension — though "Arp Omni" is a deceptive intro, one that could have come from, or fit into, an earlier chapter. The true beginning, the opening of the dance floor, is "Maestro One Chord", followed by the even more compelling "Common Loon", chosen in fact as the album's lead single (with an accompanying video starring performer Alicia McDaid), where the guitars and synth apparatus are carried by Kendrick's percussion. All mixed once again by John Congleton.
The lyrics are still packed with Stewart's obsessions, and "Pale Flower" and "Sleep Blvd." take us back to the band's most deviant sonic glories, both recalling "Stupid in the Dark" from "Angel Guts: Red Classroom". After the excellent "Veneficium", if you've managed to stay still until now, "T.D.F.T.W" will shake you out of it — an acronym for "The Devil forgiven, that's why", screamed in the chorus. After the synthetic, dissonant beats of the industrial "Bobby Bland", a carpet of synthesisers opens the closing "Piña, Coconut & Cherry".
Having written some of the most extreme, experimental pages of recent years, Xiu Xiu — now, let's not forget, on their 17th album — produce a work that, while toning down the experimental element, doesn't sacrifice the emotional and sonic intensity that has always marked Jamie Stewart's output. A work hard to compare or categorise, except as "a record only Xiu Xiu could have made".

In 2026 Xiu Xiu add a new chapter to their series of cover collections with Xiu Mutha Fuckin' Xiu: Vol. 1. From rock'n'roll to vintage industrial, from pop to new wave, the twelve tracks carry us through a blue velvet of distorted, decayed visions, hallucinated dreams and sweet, ambiguous nostalgia; a deep breath is torn from Dennis Hopper's mask for an experience that intrigues and entertains, opening a magic eye onto the musical origins of the Xiu Xiu project.

The dialogue between the American band and the art of David Lynch also continues. The decision to engage with "Eraserhead" began as a live resonorisation of original video installations inspired by the Lynchian masterpiece. In these shows, amid the bluish half-light of an acousmonium concert, the Californian duo gives voice to the nightmares and languors being projected.
In Eraserhead Xiu Xiu (2026) the atmosphere crackles and trembles in a dense fog of static electricity that heightens the sense of estrangement. The heavy use of industrial field recordings pushes the work as far as moments reminiscent of "Pretty Hate Machine" ("Tetra") — akin to the darkest Xiu Xiu ("Support Our Troops OH! Blacks Angels OH!" from Fabulous Muscle). So, amid metallic clangs, unspooled tape, unsettling TV jingle intrusions, distorted voices, toys and lopsided, invasive beats, a whole bouquet of miseries and terrors is served back to us as if we were eavesdropping from inside a horrifying tin music box.
The inevitable exercise for the listener is a dialectic with one's own capacity for abstraction. One tries to guess which iconic scene this or that moment of the track might correspond to. From the long stares at the radiators, to the grotesque quail dinner, to the premature infant's wails, to the dehumanising procession of pencils. Only "In Heaven", with its song-form structure, manages to elude this mechanism. Presented in a darker rendition, it lets itself be clouded by the sordid tension stirred up by Jamie Stewart's voice.
The final result is a layered, autonomous, vibrant and disturbing sonic body, able to retrace the original while implementing notable personal counterpoints. An approach that, all things considered, is conservative, not aiming to rebuild from scratch but rather concerned with delivering a brilliant mimesis of the work of Alan Splet and David Lynch.

Contributions by Claudio Fabretti, Alessio Belli ("Puff O'Gigio", "Girl With Basket Of Fruit", "Oh No", "Ignore Grief", "'13' Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips"), Gianni Avella/Aktivirus ("Knife Play"), Antonio Ciarletta ("La Foret"), Alberto Asquini ("Spicchiology?", "Dear God I Hate Myself"), Mattia Braida ("Dear God I Hate Myself"), Michele Saran ("Always", "Forget"), Lorenzo Bruno ("Angel Guts: Red Classroom"), Antonio Silvestri ("Plays The Music Of Twin Peaks"), Luca Viti ("Eraserhead Xiu Xiu")

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