London purveyors of quiet, nocturnal pop The xx played a series of shows last week, their first in two years, to premiere songs from their upcoming second album.

Though they've remained tight-lipped as to details of the new album thus far, Rodaidh McDonald, the in-house studio manager at The xx's label Young Turks who mixed the band's first record, today posted on Twitter that he's starting behind the desk to mix the follow-up today [via FACT]. While it's hardly much of an update, it's further news to creep out from camp xx that the new album is steadily reaching towards completion.

When the Quietus' Luke Turner attended one of the gigs last week he was very impressed at the direction the new material was taking, saying "another new track [is] possibly the longest, most complexly arranged XX song yet. It introduces steel drums used as a kind of fluid background melody instead of rhythm. The latter is instead provided by an excellent Burial-esque piston-clop, that has a strange breakdown before a vocal melody returns over the top. Given that sonically it's essentially a singer-songwriter duo playing in a venue above a well-appointed nightclub, sounds meeting in the beams between, it shouldn't work. It's a testament to skill of The xx as balancers of melody, emotion, sound and rhythm that it does." Read his full report here.

Photo by Jenna Foxton