Q&A: Editors

This record is a move away from the guitar-based songwriting the band has done in the past. What brought that on?

Ed Lay: In the start, it wasn’t a conscious move. It was a reaction to not wanting to write songs in a way that we had before. When we first went into the studio, we were looking at some ideas that were very much in the same vein of what we’d done before, but we realized that we were a bit bored with it all. Everything sounded a bit too familiar. So, after a short time, we decided that we needed to do something more inspiring, which was going to set off new ideas. We took a few days apart while [guitarist] Chris tried to write his main parts on new instruments. He put down the guitar and moved on to the synthesizer. That gave everything a different tilt, so we all looked at things differently.

What was the first song you wrote after you had this realization?

EL: “Bricks and Mortar,” which ended up being the second song on the album. It’s got a Krautrock groove, a blippy drum machine and a sweeping lead riff – it’s a real vibe song. We’ve always written our albums around a vibey song; “Munich” really got us going when we were writing our first album.

Did you go into the studio with a lot of new material that got thrown out because of this change in direction?

EL: Not really, because we hadn’t reached the recording stage where we were fully committed to songs. Once we made the change in the songwriting approach, things really picked up; everyone was writing with a sense of urgency and passion. It didn’t take us long to amass enough material to do some demos, which had an atmosphere that we knew we wanted to capture on the album. So we came to the conversation of which producer we wanted to use and, very quickly, we all singled out Flood as the guy who made some records we all love – like Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and some of those Depeche Mode albums – and who would be the guy to help us craft the world we wanted to create.

One title that jumps out on this album is “Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool.” Where did that come from?

EL: Early in the process, Tom would send around lyric ideas through email. When a title like that drops into your inbox, it freaks you out a bit. But then Tom explained it. [The guerilla graffiti artist] Banksy has a painting of the House of Commons, where the politicians are all depicted as a bunch of monkeys screeching at each other. “Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool” is along the same lines, in the sense that it’s talking about how people in power sometimes act so grotesquely, parodied through the image of them munching on strips of steak with blood dripping from their mouths. It was supposed to be a bit of a joke.

Has the new material changed the way you present yourselves as a live band?

EL: I still consider us to be an energetic – if not traditional – rock band when we’re on stage. But we’ve got so much new gear – like samplers and keyboards – that it adds to the aesthetic, because people are always switching instruments. Chris might go from guitar to keyboard to sampler to piano, all in the course of a song.

You recently contributed a song to the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack. Are you guys big fans of the series?

EL: Honestly, I’ve never seen any of the films or read any of the books. But they really seem to have struck a chord with a huge number of people, so how bad can they be?