I watch you as you strike the match
There is no heart on your sleeve like a badge
And it all wicks down, it all wicks down
Get on your knees and kiss the ground
Editors return with their first new music in four years, following the electronic experimentation of 2022’s EBM, and with Call It In, they come back to a guitar-driven sound that carries the weight of a locked room at midnight: ritual dread, real-world need, and the charged intimacy of a band lowering the lights until every private fear begins speaking out loud. At the center of it all, Tom Smith sings as if faith, fear, and dependency have been poured into the same glass; and as the song gathers force, that bitter sacrament becomes a plea for comfort in the noise of modern life, where surrender and survival start to sound dangerously alike.
“We spent a lot of summer ‘25 holed up in rural Gloucestershire, working on songs with all of us in a room, in a more traditional band set up,” says Smith. “‘Call It In’ is one of the newest songs we worked on, it’s a song about asking for help, really, in the presence of an existential dread, finding solace and comfort in someone close, escaping the deafening noise of modern life.”
That dread sits right in the marrow. The lyrics circle power, abasement, devotion, imitation, fraudulence, and the strange spiritual tinnitus of being alive now, when every private panic arrives with a public address system. Smith sings like a man staring at someone who might save him or swallow him, and maybe salvation has always had teeth. The repeated pleas land with liturgical force, less chorus than compulsion, the kind of phrase you say until meaning burns off and only need remains.
Musically, Call It In has the muscle memory of a band that knows exactly how to build pressure without turning the room into rubble. Editors have spent two decades slipping between post-punk severity, synth-rock architecture, festival-sized gloom, and electronic menace; but after the body music experimentation of 2022’s EBM, this feels more exposed and guitar-driven, all tightened nerves and stripped-down rock intimacy: drums landing with human weight, guitars circling like bad weather outside the room, and bass giving the whole thing a low, insistent drag. It is not grandstanding; it is a performance tense enough to bruise and close enough to hear the floorboards creak.
Director Justin Lockey’s performance video fits the song’s blood temperature: moody, severe, alive with the charge of musicians playing shoulder to shoulder rather than posing at profundity.
Watch the video for Call It In below:
Since forming in Birmingham in 2002, Editors have become one of Britain’s great survivors, from The Back Room and its Mercury Prize nod through chart-topping turns with An End Has A Start and In This Light And On This Evening. Call It In suggests the next chapter will not be polite housekeeping. It is a distress signal with a pulse, a prayer with bruised knuckles, and a welcome reminder that Editors still know how to make desperation sound enormous.
Listen to Call It In below:
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