Editors Depress You With Their Lyrics And Lift You With Their Music

Editors frontman Tom Smith is looking for a bright moment.

"I've been doing interviews all day long and this is the last of them," says Smith, with the good humour in his voice crackling over the phone line. "Let's go out on a high point."

Thankfully, the singer betrays none of the weariness that he must feel at being asked the same inane questions the entire day. Then again, this is what life is like right now for one of the U.K.'s hottest post-rock bands.

Their sophomore album, An End Has A Start, was released in North America on July 10. They've already rolled through a number of television and radio spots in their homeland and are busy on the festival circuit.

Editors have had a pretty heavy workload since their The Back Room debut was released in 2005. According to Smith, they didn't stop touring that album until last September. Are the four Editors superhuman, or are they ready to drop by now?

"We're OK," Smith reassures with a laugh. "We're still a young band, and right now we're at the stage where we'll just go everywhere and play to everyone.

"We're probably gonna be touring this record for another two years and, yeah, that's scary. But we don't have children or any of those things that can make touring difficult. You get one chance to get out there and lay the foundations for a career of making music."

It looks like Editors are ready to extend that chance as far as they possibly can. Short Australian and Japanese tours are interspersed amongst the U.K. festival dates, and they'll tour North America through all of September. It seems like the typical case of a British band aiming for the elusive break in North America. But, once again, Editors are ready to defy expectations.

"It'd be nice to be successful not just in England, so we're going to be out again touring this record a lot in America," says Smith. "But who knows if it'll ever break in America, or if it'll be the next record, or the next one after that. Who knows if it'll happen at all?

"There are some bands that are very successful in the U.K., and they go to America and it's not the same, so they get pissed off and come home early. They don't get enough attention there and they can't deal with it. We just enjoy the experience of going out there and getting amongst it, smiling for the photos, playing our songs and showing people how much we mean it. Right now, it's like, 'Bring it on.' I'm sure if you ask again in a year-and-a-half's time, you might get a slightly different answer, but at the moment, we're in a good place."

The majority of the new album's songs are steeped in Editors' usual dark gravitas, with lyrics obliquely — and sometimes not so obliquely — referencing death and oblivion, but backed by upbeat instrumentation that aims directly for the sentimental heartstrings.

Smith deadpans a polite apology when I inform him that I was nearly brought to tears by the U2-esque "When Anger Shows" and its desperate refrain of "I need you to tell me it's OK."

"The lyrics are, again, about serious things, and they're a collection of songs that do focus in on death," says Smith. "Scary stuff.

"But the lyrics have always been serious. Musically, I think it's more of a glorious listen. It's quite uplifting and, if you take the songs without the lyrics, hopefully they'll make your heart beat faster. Again, we like having that combination of those songs that feel like that, but when you listen to them, they'll make you think — songs that maybe aren't so throwaway in their nature. As far as pop music goes, they're pretty heavy-going, and that's fine. It's good for people."

As long as people crave music that juxtaposes razor-edged mourning with much brighter melodies, Editors will always have an audience.

Editors play Montreal's Osheaga Festival on Sept. 8 and Toronto's Virgin Festival the next day.