- Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors
- An End Has A Start
- The Weight Of The World
- Bones
- When Anger Shows
- The Racing Rats
- Push Your Head Towards The Air
- Escape The Nest
- Spiders
- Well Worn Hand
Confronting Fragility
Editors’ An End Has a Start (2007) is an album that turns anxiety into architecture - gothic, gleaming, and grand. Every note feels like it’s chiselled from the tension between collapse and endurance, between the fear of loss and the stubborn will to keep living. It’s a record built on pulse and poetry, one that stares down mortality not with resignation, but with fierce, trembling grace.
Where their debut The Back Room captured the stark chill of urban isolation, An End Has a Start expands outward - wider skies, deeper emotions, and a sound that feels like it was designed to fill cathedrals. The band’s signature interplay of shadow and light remains, but here it carries a new sense of uplift, as if every thundering drum and searing guitar line is pushing against the dark rather than merely dwelling in it.
Tom Smith’s baritone is the emotional core - urgent yet vulnerable, equal parts plea and proclamation. His voice doesn’t just sing about loss; it seems to wrestle with it in real time, giving the album its almost spiritual intensity. The production matches that ambition: dense, cinematic, and unashamedly dramatic, yet anchored by a human heartbeat that never lets the gloss overpower the grit.
What makes An End Has a Start so compelling is its paradox. It’s melancholic but muscular, despairing yet defiant. It finds beauty in the inevitability of endings and turns the language of collapse into a hymn for survival. The record doesn’t offer comfort so much as clarity - the understanding that beginnings and endings are forever intertwined.
In the end, An End Has a Start isn’t about doom; it’s about momentum. It’s the sound of a band looking into the abyss and deciding to build bridges across it. Urgent, elegant, and unflinchingly alive - it remains one of the 2000s’ most moving testaments to the power of holding on when everything feels like it’s falling apart.
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My personal view:
An End Has a Start is the second album by British new wave revival band Editors. Their debut was always going to be a tough act to follow, and the critics' reactions were mixed. For me, it is at the same high level as their first - if anything maybe even a bit better. I agree with one critic who wrote: "it ultimately works better than its predecessor as a cohesive, flowing album". It did pretty well in the charts in Europe (including the UK) as well. The best songs for me are Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors, An End Has A Start, The Weight Of The World, The Racing Rats, and Spiders.