100 Greatest Tracks of the 00’s #46 Editors – Munich

Released: 2005

Editors weren’t the first band to draw comparisons to Joy Division – an outfit themselves who’d been enjoying a significant early noughties renaissance, even if it was a posthumous one. That accolade/admonishment had first been levelled at Interpol, who in re-energising the sound of 80’s trenchcoated young manhood were deemed heretical for being from Brooklyn instead of Ancoats.

From an equally post industrial Birmingham, Editors enjoyed a meteoric rise, the first 1,000 copies of their single Bullets selling out in 24 hours. Dubbed ‘Britain’s gloomiest band’ by the NME, even the slightest amount of attention to their music revealed that any links to the country’s post punk heritage were at best tenuous; singer Tom Smith’s angst matched that of Ian Curtis, but that was about the limit of it.

Their second single Munich was suffused with an uncool melodrama, it’s hard chopped riffs, urgency and portentous lyrics rendered against Smith’s gruff baritone. Whatever was happening, it sounded like it was important, that it had gravity and that it needed to be known. It’s shades of grey were somehow familiar though, and at once all the things that had made the early pioneers of the self proclaimed centre of rock’s universe felt true again – and Britain’s gloomiest band were suddenly it’s most exciting.