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Last Played: 11-20-2009 1:01 pm

The xx’s debut album xx is nothing less than a whole new sound of love, loss and longing. The London quartet’s unique make-up is an inadvertent second nature marriage of 2009's urban/guitar tribes, in one corner fluttering new wave indebted reverberation, in the other, plumes of post-dubstep sub-bass and their defining core of rich R&B vocal textures.

If It all reads on paper like some potentially post-modern hodgepodge, then this makes their timeless results all the more alluring. The enveloping vocal partnership of guitarist Romy Madley Croft and bassist Oliver Sim is one that would've dropped-jaws in any decade this century, and set amidst a shivering soundscape of beats and plucks, their bedroom-reared concrete-soul is being justly heralded as the UK's most original and treasured alt-pop artifact of late.

The stark, soulful blues of xx is a thoroughly 21st-century hybrid of genres and styles, as fresh and progressive as you’d expect from a group just out of their teens, but with depth and weight both lyrically and musically that belies the youth of its creators. The xx create a wash of sexy, coy, cold and sad rhythms and melodies, and at the end of it all you’ll have no doubt that you’ve heard one of the albums of the year. Thankfully, at least one of this year's most important names in music is an easy one to remember.