Editors will be warming up for their forthcoming European Festival appearances with a one-off UK show at Roadmenders on Wednesday 14th June.
Editors have never been a band who do what’s expected. When they emerged in the early 2000s, university friends from Birmingham, they were swept into a wave of indie groups with whom they had little in common beyond playing guitars.
Then, after their 2005 Mercury Prize-shortlisted debut The Back Room and 2007 #1 follow-up An End Has A Start, they switched up their sound for synths. That was their first act of bravery, says frontman Tom Smith, and they’ve been taking risks ever since. “We’re quite used to that feeling of scaring our audience with new material,” he says with a smile.
“It seems to happen with every album,” agrees guitarist Justin Lockey. “We’ll do something that everyone really likes, and then we’ll go and do something else.”
That ‘something else’ is a breathlessly heavy step up, with their seventh album, EBM. It’s Editors’ most leftfield material yet – a thrilling, unrelenting thrust of full-bodied electro-industrial rock.
Another new dawn: Benjamin John Power – aka Blanck Mass – has co-produced the album and come aboard as an official member. To outside ears, it might seem like an unusual pairing: an anthemic rock band who’ve headlined Wembley Arena and an Ivor Novello-winning composer who is best known for his abrasive noise projects.
Even Benjamin himself admits it was a “leap of faith”. But Editors’ evolution makes perfect sense. They’ve toured with The Cure, of whom they are all huge fans, and are used to playing European festivals where they’re billed alongside harder acts.
In Germany, for example, “we’re not seen as some melodic indie band,” says Justin, “we’re seen as super goth.” He adds: “We talked about Rammstein quite a lot when we’re making this record.”
Benjamin’s journey to joining Editors was a surprisingly organic one.
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He had worked on the band’s last album, 2018’s Violence, giving some songs a more brutal, industrial edge, the full realisations of which came out as 2019’s The Blanck Mass Sessions. That same year, Editors were asked to both headline a festival in Belgium and create a bespoke set for later on in the night.
They approached Benjamin to see whether he’d be up for helping to retool their songs in a dancier direction. But with the pandemic underway, the festival never happened and Editors were left with a bunch of new ideas during the ensuing lockdowns that were designed for – as Benjamin puts it – a “dirty rave tent”.
They continued swapping ideas anyway, and the band began buzzing about where this music was headed: shadowier, beefier, exploring their shared love of synth-pop, industrial and alt-rock, it started to feel like a new chapter – the band’s third act. For the first time, the song structures weren’t coming from Tom and he says it was a novel but exciting exercise to receive the files and tinker with them, with Justin, Elliott Williams (keyboards/guitars), drummer Ed Lay and bassist Russell Leetch fleshing out their parts in the studio when they eventually regrouped.
“Ben has certainly been a shot of adrenaline in our creative process,” says Tom. “The songs are so immediate, and in your face.”
Tickets priced £30 are on sale from Seetickets & Venue Website from 10am tomorrow (Fri, May 12).
