Last Friday, FACT was invited to a listening party for We’re New Here, Jamie xx’s first solo album and a remix album of Gil Scott-Heron’s 2010 LP I’m New Here.

We’re not going to waffle on – how much can you can really take in after one listen of an album? – but for those interested, here are some notes on the record:

It’s a nice length (we’d left the FACT stopwatch in the office, but we’d guess it’s around the 40 minute mark), and has an upward trajectory from washed out, stuttered drum tracks, through forlorn garage punctured by distant trancey stabs, and finally – and most memorably – pill-numbed piano house.

The tracks on the record wash into each other, so it’s basically one continuous run of music. You can tell both the sequencing and the tracks themselves have been painstakingly worked on; there’s a lot of really neat touches (filters, needles dropping on records, vinyl pops and hiss), and the album’s climax is memorably announced by a wholesale sample of Rui de Silva’s ‘Touch Me’. If you need comparisons then FaltyDL and Burial are the obvious two to make, but the vibe fits in very nicely with the small canon of Jamie xx work to date; unimposing music that slowly eases you into rushing moments of euphoria if you let it.

You can tell this album’s been made by a fan of the original; there’s source material taken from bonus tracks and session material, and a healthy balance between a dedication to keeping its dark, lost-in-the-city vibe intact and a desire to expand on it. Gil’s voice gets warped throughout the record, and at one point he sounds like Tricky.

It’s pretty good. Did you expect anything less? You can stream a track from the record, ‘New York is Killing Me’, below.