best record from the UK and Ireland. Following an exhausting tour, the xx went on a break. The band's producer and percussionist Jamie Smith pursued electronic dance styles on other musical projects, creating remixes for Radiohead, Adele, and Florence and the Machine. He also collaborated on Gil Scott-Heron's 2011 album We're New Here, and produced Drake's 2012 song "Take Care". The latter exemplified and helped popularise the xx's sound as well. A novice to DJing when starting out with the xx, he subsequently learned its technical aspects and developed a grasp on controlling the crowd through unexpected silences and drops during his live sets. Writing and recording In 2011, the xx opened their own recording studio in London and began writing songs for Coexist during the summer. Each member—guitarist Romy Madley Croft, bassist Oliver Sim, and Smith—wrote music individually and recorded snippets using GarageBand or their phones. Both Croft and Sim drew on personal experiences and wrote more direct lyrics than on the band's debut to express complex emotions. Sim said of his songwriting for Coexist, "I found myself being a lot less 'moons and stars' and being a lot more literal." Croft felt more expectations from listeners than when the band debuted and consequently turned to more personal songwriting for Coexist: They wrote, recorded, and emailed music back and forth to each other before working together in a rehearsal space in East London. When he first read them, Smith found Croft and Sim's lyrics to be "purposely ambiguous so people can relate to them", saying in an interview for Uncut, "I mean... if I listen carefully, I do know about their lives intimately so I can guess what they're about. But they don't even tell each other what they're singing about." The xx started recording Coexist in November 2011, and used a photography studio in North London to record the songs they had put together. They later used the rehearsal space in East London to practice playing the songs live. They recorded for six months in London and intended to finish before their scheduled music festival appearances for 2012. The xx's direction for the album was partly inspired by the electronic dance scene that occurred while they toured for their first album, as well as the live DJ sets of Smith, who was mostly listening to dark Chicago house music at the time. According to him, "We left [to