On Sunday evening, the crowd at the Forêt stage really filled up to conclude Osheaga 2025, with Olivia Rodrigo drawing the largest audience. To skip out on the young superstar and find yourself at the other end of the site, you needed a solid proposition, and that’s what Jamie xx delivered.
The 36-year-old Londoner has been pursuing a parallel career to his band (The xx) since his professional debut. Over time, he has achieved mastery as an electronic composer/producer, and Sunday provided a compelling illustration of this.
Jamie xx’s tracks are not designed like songs but often feature choruses repeated at just the right moment. The grooves are varied and the samples interesting.
For the French speakers in the audience, he played “Dans la tête” (Pura Pura, Kaba, Brodinsky), and for all Osheaga fans, he played recent material from his solo project, the excellent album In Waves, a notebook filled with invitations and references—The xx, Honey Dijon, Erikah Badu, Robyn, Panda Bear, etc. Of course, the prestigious special guests didn’t show up on stage at the festival, but their studio echoes did.
Jamie xx’s different approaches are reflected in 17 songs (in the Deluxe version released in 2025), and we were treated to many versions designed for the stage.
Disco, house, soul/R&B, techno, ambient, pop, and textural explorations are among the building blocks.
So festival-goers shook their booties during the hour and a quarter reserved for Jamie xx. The screens showed the dancing crowd and other references to club culture. The artist did not focus on promoting himself, preferring to blend into the collective experience and share the In Waves journey with this vast audience. Far from the status quo, unifying for all the right reasons, Jamie xx made waves to our great delight, and this sonic tale achieved its objectives: to uplift and entertain.
