Photo by Noah Kalina

Smith has been going like this for a while now: not only touring heavily with the xx but also enjoying his own increasingly high-profile career as a producer and DJ. This year alone, he's already spun in Australia, Japan, Iceland, and the States. In Colour is the culmination of a solo career that has progressed in fits and starts since 2009, when he remixed Florence and the Machine's UK hit "You've Got the Love". Since then, he's put out a handful of singles; remixed Adele, Radiohead, and Four Tet; and collaborated with the late Gil Scott-Heron on the album-length remix project We're New Here. Meanwhile, the xx are at work on their third album: When I meet up with Smith in March, they're finishing their first week of sessions at a 160-year-old church-turned-recording-studio.

Radiohead: "Bloom (Jamie xx Rework Part 3)" (via SoundCloud)

We listen to a lot of music that afternoon, some of it unfinished, some never to be released officially. Over a four-to-the-floor beat punctuated by shrieks, FKA twigs' voice—repurposed from an unused session—zigzags through the room like a deflating balloon. He plays a sort of chopped-and-screwed doo-wop miniature featuring tremolo so severe it's as though the notes are trying to pull themselves apart at a molecular level. "So in love, are we two/ And we don't know what to do," goes the chorus, slow and narcotic, thick as a tongue swollen from crying. It's the most desolate thing I've ever heard from Smith.

Before I can even ask him about it, he volunteers, "I made that on the night I broke up with my girlfriend of three years." He grins slightly, seemingly pleased by my reaction to both the song and his forthrightness.

The only thing he plays that’s related to the new album is an alternate take of "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)", which revolves around a sample of the ‘70s R&B group the Persuasions. On In Colour, Atlanta eccentric Young Thug and dancehall howler Popcaan trade verses on the track, chirping and whistling over Smith's trademark Technicolor chimes. The song seems like an outlier at first, but after a few listens, it starts to feel like one of the album's cornerstones. That big, fat, generous morsel of R&B goes to the heart of the way Smith treats his inspirations, and Popcaan's voice makes good on the subtle Caribbean vibe of so many Jamie xx records, with their omnipresent steel drums, exploding with overtones.

He discovered steel pans while recording the first xx album, and, on tour in the U.S., he ended up buying a child-size version of instrument, which he describes in rapturous terms. "You can make it sound quite melancholy," he says. "But at the same time, it reminds me of paradise.”