Islands

This is a track from English indie rock band, The xx's self-titled debut album.

Singer Romy told The Sun October 30, 2009: "I love 'Islands' because I found it quite hard to write something more upbeat and light-hearted. We were into this calypso drumming beat and asked Jamie [beats/production] if he could help with those sort of sounds like bongos. That's what makes that song so special."

Vocalist Romy Madley Croft and bassist Oliver Sim, who first met at nursery school, are the band's joint lyricists and this track about finding "the one," the person you want to spend the rest of your life is typical of the love songs they write together. Romy explained in the January 2010 edition of Clash magazine the difficulties of writing a love song with her oldest friend: "We write our lyrics completely separately, so we are never really addressing each other when we are singing. Ollie is my oldest friend and they are pretty much love songs so it'd be pretty weird, pouring our hearts out and directing it at each other. We both write at home, have our privacy and then send each other our lyrics over the Internet; it's quite a removed thing where we don't need to explain too deeply what they mean. We can just react in our own way to each other's lyrics. I do write a lot at home at night, locked away, hidden away and I shut myself off for quite a long time just writing so I think there's a theme to this isolation I am sure."