The Guardian First Album award winner: the xx

By any standards, the xx's eponymous debut, winner of the 2009 Guardian First Album award, was a record with unassuming beginnings. So unassuming, in fact, that at least one member of the band seems to have been slightly startled that their label asked them to make an album at all. "I suppose I might have been naive really," says singer Romy Madley Croft, crackling down a telephone line from Australia, where the band find themselves wilting slightly on a festival tour. "The record label signed us after a gig, when we only had a ­couple of songs. They must have seen something in us and took a chance ­really. I'm very grateful that they did. In the beginning, they gave us a place to rehearse and got us some gigs. There was never any talk of releasing ­anything. When, after a year and a half, they said they wanted to make an album with us, I was quite surprised." She laughs. "I don't know what else I thought they were going to ask us to do." They attempted to work with some well-known ­producers, including ­Philadelphia baile funk and hip-hop DJ Diplo, but ended up producing the record themselves: "We actually ended up going back to a lot of the early demos that we'd done, which were very simple, very basic, and ­realised that we actually had our own sound. It was ­already there, it was OK, we just needed to record it well, do it better than we'd done it before." Even the most oft-remarked aspect of that sound – the xx's gorgeous sense of hushed, subtle, early-hours ­introversion – had its roots in something rather more prosaic than a concerted ­attempt to create subtle atmospherics. "That's on the demos, too," says Croft. "I was very shy about singing in front of other people, even my dad, so I used to wait until he went to bed, really late at night, when there was nobody around. Then I'd record. It's much ­quieter in London at that time of night as well. We live on a main road." Recorded in a garage, hushed in ­order to not wake someone's dad up: from an inauspicious start, the xx's ­album has gradually grown into a ­something ­approaching a phenomenon. According to Metacritic, a website that collates ­reviews from around the world, the xx received the rare accolade of "universal acclaim", it was nominated for two South Bank Show awards, it seems a shoo-in for the Mercury, and it's also won the Guardian's First ­Album award, plucked from the ­ shortlist by a judging panel including Liam Fray, frontman of last year's ­winners, the Courteeners. The xx were run close by the ­eclecticism of Golden Silvers's melding of ­doo-wop, Dexy's, electronics and funk, and the self-styled "experimental genre-hopping space pop" of the ­Invisible, but ultimately they were unanimous ­winners. The album was loved not just for its originality (for all the apposite comparisons to early Cure and Young Marble Giants, it's more ­obviously ­soulful and yearning than ­either), its heavy lidded sensuality, and the startling maturity of its ­songwriting, but for the way, in a world of new bands desperate to grab the ­public's attention, the xx seem to have done just that by being as understated as possible. It's not an ­album that begs you to like it, nor is it particularly ­immediate: it demands time and effort on the part of the listener. "It seems like such a reflection of our personalities," agrees Croft. "We weren't the kind of people who would go round handing out flyers to our gigs that were coming up, or telling ­people: oh, we're in a band. It didn't feel natural to do that. People used to say to us, oh, I didn't know you were in a band, I found you on MySpace. The ­album, the way it has kind of built up, it feels very comfortable for us. I think I'd feel very uncomfortable if it had been shoved in people's faces. ­Sometimes, you see a band everywhere and people are talking about it and ­saying it's great and you think, you know what? I want to make up my own mind. This seems genuinely more about the music than about us."