to be "the story of a relationship broken by the protagonists' tendency to love too much while being unable to express their need to each other." Eric Sundermann of The A.V. Club views that the album's songs "all focus on different stages of romantic love, from infatuation to frustration to all the other stuff that falls in between." Kevin Liedel of Slant Magazine felt that the songs follow-up on the "lovebirds" from the xx's debut album, "now separated and devastated ... mus[ing] on what went wrong". Puja Patel of Spin remarks that the band's "fantastical, elemental star-crossed-lover talk has been replaced by evocations of a harder, more aggressively worked-at love". Most of the songs have single-word titles that evoke long sentiments. The xx's lyrics on Coexist feature broader diction than on the xx's first record and employ simple metaphors of light and darkness, and distance and time. They often express emotional stress, yearning, and passive-aggressive attitudes. Some songs feature a lyrical conceit of an emotionally elusive lover as an apparition or an illusion. Croft and Sim avoid traditional duet lyrics about declarations of love, instead employing inner monologues to depict the same situation from two different perspectives. Eric Sundermann asserts that, rather than "simply" being "declarations", the songs serve as "the thought process of how to deal with interpersonal struggles." Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph perceives "intimate conversations between forlorn lovers" and an "almost sacred eroticism in Croft and Sim's whispery vocals." Drowned in Sound's Hayden Woolley views that the album shares its predecessor's "fragility", "quiet gravitas", and "heavy words", but is "an intensely wind-torn and wounded album that cuts even deeper than its predecessor." Music journalist Luke Turner calls its subject matter more "turbulent, sensual and fun" than on the group's first album and states, "of course not necessarily a sexual or romantic one, the feel of this second record is far more earthy, sticky, complicated, like the tension of the second or third encounters after a one night stand." Songs "Angels" opens Coexist with a restrained style and soft-spoken verses about the idea of being in love. Croft's lyrics compare the premature end of a relationship to "dreaming of angels, and leaving without them", and touch on the private knowledge that is acquired through intimacy. "Chained" experiments with musical buildup and subtle flourishes, and muffled 2-step beats. Its lyrics lament a couple's distance from each other. On