Surface, Echo & Sound review: Editors make unconvincing return to postpunk that made them stars

Surface, Echo & Sound

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Artist: Editors

Label: Pias Recordings

Alternative rock has never recovered from the blight of the “landfill indie” bands that afflicted our unsuspecting eardrums in the early 21st century.

It was largely a British phenomenon. Something about the mix of chippy regionalism and the manic cheerleading of a UK music press on the brink of extinction conspired to concoct a scene that became a punching bag almost as soon as it coalesced. It’s as if it existed so that we could hate it.

Why was landfill indie so reviled when the Britpop explosion of a decade earlier is remembered so fondly? It wasn’t as if the music was especially atrocious – Britpop, in its later years, was every bit as awful. That question occurs when listening to the new album by Editors, one of the many landfill-indie bands who wore their lineage on their sleeves, for better or worse.

In their case the obvious antecedents were Joy Division, who at that point had yet to be canonised as patron saints of British guitar rock but whose status as one of the most influential bands of the postpunk era was already assured.

The imponderable Editors posed was whether it was okay to like something new when it was so very obviously in hock to the past. Because if songs such as Blood and Munich were ferocious and catchy, they were woven from strands of Joy Division’s DNA, whether through the doomy vocals of Tom Smith or the dark, driven playing of Chris Urbanowicz, their soon-to-depart guitarist.

Editors obviously had something about them, because they were spared the critical pasting visited on the steerage class of landfill-indie bands, outfits whose names – The Twang, The Pigeon Detectives, The Automatic – still return to haunt some of us in the middle of the night.

One way that Editors survived was by doing something beyond many of their peers – even bands who genuinely had something to say, such as Pete Doherty’s Libertines. And that was the ability to evolve musically, morphing into a sort of Stygian Coldplay with The Weight of Your Love, their album from 2013 (by which point Urbanowicz had exited), and then going full doomy electronica on EBM, their best LP, from 2022.

Yet now, 21 years on from their debut, The Back Room, they’ve gone full circle with Surface, Echo & Sound, a record that comes back around to the postpunk that made them an overnight phenomenon in the first place. They’ve returned to the source – or, if you prefer, the landfill – and try to piece together a worthwhile record out of the discarded odds and ends of their old sound.

But this drab album suggests that some things are best left behind, including boil-in-the-bag Joy Division riffs. It starts, deceptively, with the low-key Chris Martin-style indie balladry of the title track.

But we’re soon heading straight to the new-wave hoedown with Call It In, whose zinging riffs and dystopian lyrics (“It all breaks down ... it all breaks down”) rewind the years to the early 21st century, when any group of scruffy kids from a small British city could land a record deal.

That formula is replicated on Real, another excessive slab of postpunk minimalism that struggles to rise above its influences and will disappoint fans who were cheered to find Editors attempt something new on EBM.

To their credit, they do sometimes try to expand beyond their well-worn formula: there are echoes of REM in The Rush (one of several tracks featuring Smith on mandolin) while Butterfly Wings evokes the open-mic bombast of peak David Gray.

Since their second album, An End Has a Start, Editors have been smart enough always to keep pushing forward. But now they’re going back – to underwhelming effect. It’s proof that some things are best left in the past. When it comes to music, the creative morass that was landfill indie is surely one of the chief among them.