June 2013 Editors: The Weight of Your Love

 
  1. The Weight
  2. Sugar
  3. A Ton Of Love
  4. What Is This Thing Called Love
  5. Honesty
  6. Nothing
  7. Formaldehyde
  8. Hyena
  9. Two Hearted Spider
  10. The Phone Book
  11. Bird Of Prey
Cathedrals Built from Bruises

With The Weight of Your Love, Editors step into a grander, widescreen version of themselves - an album that pulses with muscular emotion, sweeping drama, and an almost architectural sense of scale. It marks a turning point for the band, arriving after internal fissures and lineup changes, and you can hear that history pressing into the music. This is an album forged under pressure, and it carries the heft of a group rebuilding their identity with both trepidation and renewed conviction.

Gone is some of the angular austerity that defined their early work; in its place stands something broader, more overtly romantic, occasionally even cinematic. Tom Smith’s baritone remains the gravitational center, but here it is framed by arrangements that stretch upward and outward - bold strings, resonant acoustics, and a sense of emotional theatre that the band had previously only hinted at. The result is a kind of dark-limned grandeur, a love of big gestures combined with the band’s ever-present penchant for existential unease.

What gives the album its depth is its tension between vulnerability and ambition. Editors reach for sweeping heights, yet they never fully shed the shadows trailing behind them. There is a bruised quality to the performances, a sense that even the grandest moments are stitched together from something fragile and frayed. That duality - confident yet wounded - creates a compelling atmosphere, one that feels at once open-hearted and haunted.

Though the instrumentation is more spacious, the emotional core remains tightly wound. The band explores love not as a blissful state but as a series of fault lines: devotion under strain, connection as risk, tenderness shadowed by fear of loss. It’s not the weight of love as comfort - it’s the gravity of caring, the burden of giving oneself over to something that can shatter you. Editors wrap that complexity in melodies that feel immediately accessible but reveal deeper fractures the longer you sit with them.

There’s also a renewed physicality to the music. You can sense the band embracing a more direct, muscular sound, as if trying to ground their introspection in something tactile. Yet even with this robustness, the album never becomes bombastic. Its emotional stakes are high, but its delivery remains thoughtful, measured, carefully balanced between intimacy and spectacle.

The Weight of Your Love may not replicate the stark coolness of Editors’ earlier releases, but it doesn’t aim to. Instead, it offers a bold recalibration - a band grappling openly with change and choosing to expand rather than retreat. It’s an album that wears its heart on its sleeve while still glancing nervously at the shadows at its edges.

In embracing both their tenderness and their turmoil, Editors craft one of their most human statements: a cathedral of longing and resolve built from the bruises love leaves behind. 
 
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My personal view: 
After the experimental synthesizer-heavy In This Light and on This Evening, which I found OK but not great, Editors return to the sound of their first two albums, in a collection of excellent melodic songs. Although critics had mixed feelings about this, I for one welcomed it wholeheartedly. There is a sense of maturity here in terms of song writing, with a great mixture of epic rock songs and ballads. In particular I like The Weight, Sugar,  Formaldehyde, Two Hearted Spider, Bird Of Prey and especially one of their very best songs: Nothing.