Editors can’t quite shake off the past on their seventh studio album.
Of all the complicated relationships musicians have to deal with, one of the most labyrinthine is that with their own identity – how people look at them, what they want to stand for and how to mould it over time.
The longer your career spans, the harder this balancing act seems to get; when Editors first appeared in the mid-2000s, their doomy brand of gothic post-punk drew comparisons to Interpol and more speciously Joy Division, the potent sense of drama earning them a Mercury nomination for debut The Back Room and sending its follow-up An End Has A Start to the top of the UK charts.
Perhaps ahead of their time, after that they consciously chose to avoid being typecast as purely guitar merchants by introducing programming and electronics into their sound, 2019 compilation Black Gold neatly exploring these various split personalities.
But apparently, we had it even wronger than that: ahead of the release of their seventh full album EBM, Tom Smith and co. have been stressing that in fortress Europe the band are not seen as just some ‘melodic indie rockers’ (his words) but instead are often placed on festival bills with edgier outfits, having also toured with The Cure.
Evolution also continues to shape them with the addition, since 2018’s last long player Violence, to their line-up of Benjamin John Power, AKA Blanck Mass.
An Ivor Novello winner, the Scot has forged a reputation for bold sonic experimentation over the last decade, and even after the pandemic initially ruined their plans for collaboration, a determined Smith knew he had the right man to kick start what he describes is now distinctly Editors’ ‘third chapter’.
There are some obvious hallmarks of transition; tracks are longer, with Kiss reaching a most un-6Music friendly 8 minutes long, recalling the elite mid-80’s synth bangers of New Order or The Pet Shop boys, a tune so club infused that Power has admitted it could ‘almost be a Donna Summer song’.
So far, so not so head-mashing, but after almost 2 decades it’s apparent that the players here are way too shrewd for resorting to just strobes and darkness.
Opener Heart Attack certainly opens buzzing with industrial menace, but the richness of Smith’s baritone is wisely left unmolested and even a barrage of bleeps, beats and white noise fails to totally overwhelm the glaze of inner pop at work.
No soul-selling then. In reality, what’s working here is largely what’s done so for the quintet ever since they left the NME Tour circuit, Karma Climb’s familiar set-up (not all the guitars were ritually sacrificed it seems) making good on heard-before promises, whilst Silence is, whisper it quietly, a dramatically loaded ballad, one of their best.
Smith has rarely been direct with his lyrics either, but he overtly addresses a deliberately divided Britain on Strawberry Lemonade with, ‘Can you feel the broken nation?’, but nobody is here carrying a Molotov, instead – even when reaching the final chance to shock – closer Strange Intimacy can be heard in conflict with itself, an industrial rattle but doused with piano overtures ABBA would’ve been happy to use.
That’s the weird thing with identity, how easy it is to hear something that somebody else doesn’t when you thought you’d buried the past. EBM is a new Editors, but not quite the sound of radical prophets or ghosts in the machine.
A mask after all it just a mask.
