"Girl" is the last track from Jamie xx's ( English record producer and The xx member Jamie Smith) debut studio album In Colour (2015). The album has gained widespread critical acclaim; Consequence of Sound's Nina Corcoran singles out "Girl" as an essential track and notes that Jamie Smith "has been scheming ever since he was gifted his first turntables at age 10; but now, at 26 years old, he’s mixing a sound all his own. Each song grows richer the more you explore its open space. Its minimalism breathes buckets of color."
Even so, "Girl" doesn't quite compare to The xx's "Islands" as an arresting exploration of modern love, intimacy and desire on a lyrical level. It nevertheless manages to appeal as a charming, playful, and intriguing song. The lyrics are notably minimal, the track begins with a spoken word sample ('You're the most beautiful girl in Hackney y'know?') before looping, reverbing and distorting the refrain 'I want your love/ I want your love/ I want your love/ Give me your love'.
The disembodied vocals merge in a quirky and soulful manner with the instrumentals, which The Guardian's Tim Jonze describes "the right side of strange": "In Colour can at times be murky, minimalist and ghostly, offering up a distant and dislocated take on the last two decades or so of London club culture. There are euphoric moments – when a simple synth line has an illuminatingly transformative effect on Gosh, for instance – but elsewhere there is plenty of dance music here for people whose primary intention isn’t dancing."
It's hard to define exactly what the vocal distortions and Jamie xx's rich, fluid, complex and minimalist palette of electronic flourishes amount to - but Dusted's Patrick Masterson is probably on to something when he observes that "Jamie developed an ear for the emotional, the vulnerable, the intangible, rather than a particular style". Masterson notes that "Girl" has a Balearic feel (a.k.a. 'the sound of Ibiza'), successfully blending the trance-like euphoria associated with house music with the soulful melancholy that is beautifully refracted with each reiteration of the refrain.
