The UK’s #1 selling album and Europe Charts topper “This Light And On This Evening” is being released in the US via Fader Label on January 19th 2010. Digital pre-releases are now available via iTunes and other retailers.
As the old adage goes – If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Editors have decided that they’ll do the former, thank you. In This Light And On This Evening, which debuted at #1 in the UK charts last week, is the follow-up to 2007’s platinum selling record An End Has A Start, and was produced by Grammy Award winner Mark “Flood” Ellis (U2, Sigur Ros, Depeche Mode). The album finds Editors heading in a daring new direction where synths replace the soaring guitars and lead singer Tom Smith takes his vocals to haunting new places giving the album a dystopian, apocalyptic, mechanical ambience.
Lyrically, Smith drew heavily on his new-found appreciation of London – his ‘adopted home town’ – for the stories that weave throughout the record. From the opening track (which is also the album’s title) “In This Light and On This Evening” referencing a view from Primrose Hill at dusk, to ‘The Boxer‘ telling of the Friday night disturbances of London’s pub culture, to the brutal imagery of a carnivorous House Of Commons on ‘Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool‘, the locations of London and its people are the very heart and soul of the record.
Some things are vintage Editors, make no mistake. The record is as bleak and as vivid as ever: “a record that sings of no God, a record of broken love songs, a record where the filthy city is so close you can smell it, taste it, a record of drunken violence, a record which has lost all trust in those in charge of our world,” describes Smith. But those who focus on the gloom-and-doom in itself, he says, are missing the point. “Dark is interesting, dark is exciting, dark can be funny, there’s real life in the dark, real life IS dark. When an album feels like this, the fragments of hope and love that do occasionally shine through, shine through ten times brighter than they would normally do so.” Exhibit A: the album’s stirring closer ‘Walk The Fleet Road.’ It tells of a lost soul, cold and alone, consumed by vitriol. “Hate can turn to love,” sings Smith, the gentle patriarch. Stark, life-affirming, gorgeous – it will move you.
Inevitably, as with any shift of this magnitude, fans of the band will be divided on their new sound. “Good,” says Smith. Editors have had their critics. Listening to them never got them anywhere.