Editors

Since 2002 · United Kingdom

Editors formed in Birmingham in 2002, arriving as part of a mid-2000s wave of British bands that looked back past Britpop toward post-punk's colder, more cavernous end. Their story

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Who they shaped

Nobody on the map lists them as an influence yet.

Behind them, left to right: Echo & the Bunnymen, The Chameleons, Joy Division.

The bigger the face, the stronger the proof: they said it themselvesreporteda critic, or widely accepted

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The Back Room (2005)

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The Back Room revives post-punk's coldest, most cavernous instincts and dresses them up as arena-ready anthems, reverb-drenched guitars circling Tom Smith's booming baritone. "Munich" pairs a tense, needling guitar riff with a chorus built to fill much larger rooms than the band was playing at the time, a tension that defines the whole record. Nothing here hides its debt to the Chameleons and Echo & the Bunnymen, yet the songwriting is confident enough not to feel like pure homage. It remains the clearest statement of the mid-2000s British post-punk revival's more anthemic wing.

Sleeve notes

Editors

The Back Room · 2005

Editors formed in Birmingham in 2002, arriving as part of a mid-2000s wave of British bands that looked back past Britpop toward post-punk's colder, more cavernous end. The band has cited The Chameleons and Echo & the Bunnymen directly, and that lineage shows clearly across the group's early singles, a sound built as much for cavernous festival tents as for headphones.

The Back Room, released in 2005, introduced that sound to a wide UK audience and established Editors as one of the more commercially successful bands to emerge from the post-punk revival of the period. The band has continued recording and touring in the two decades since, refining and occasionally darkening its sound across several later albums while remaining closely identified with the atmosphere established on its debut, still filling the same large rooms its early singles were built for.