Gig review: Editors at O2 Academy Leeds

There is little fanfare when Editors take to the stage at 8.30pm sharp on a Tuesday night. The lights simply drop on the stage at Leeds’s O2 Academy, the band stroll into place and Tom Smith – louchely earnest in appearance, like a cross between Nick Cave and Peter Garrett – counts off Two Hearted Spider without so much as a greeting. This show is therefore business as usual.

Once among the flagbearers of the British post-punk revival movement that, for a brief moment, seemed to sweep guitar music across the nation in the mid-noughties, the Birmingham outfit still stand above their peers thanks to the twin flames of creative success and commercial survival.

Tonight’s late February date pays testament to that notion; it is a sweaty affair, bodies crunched together in unison. Close your eyes and you could be transported back to 2007.

It helps that the group’s new material holds up two decades into their career. 2022’s EBM, which they ostensibly remain in support of, finally brought the widescreen electronica ambitions they have harboured to visceral fruition; tracks such as Picturesque, throbbing with rave-ready industrial hooks, and Strange Intimacy, which squares crash-chord stabs to a relentless beat, slot seamlessly next to the classics, from Munich’s dancefloor wiriness to the heady krautpop of Papillion, all in propulsive lockstep with Smith’s stentorian baritone.

Throughout, cloaked in dry ice and strobed by an array of hellish hues that offer the impression they might well be descending through the seven circles of Spaghetti Junction, the group deliver on the promise of bruisingly tight songcraft, if almost to a painful fault.

Motoring through a near-two-hour set that ticks off every record in their back catalogue, it can often feel akin to an indie disco flattened by sledgehammers; old-school favourites, like Blood and Bones, find themselves enlivened with root-canal rumbles and twitch-glitch spasms of cathartic noise.

Those twin modes of angular NYC-era riffs and nu-retro synths mostly dominate proceedings, though the gothic grandeur of No Harm midway through offers a breather, its textures translated with an artfully conservative touch. Otherwise, there is little time for chit-chat as Editors breathlessly vault from between songs, with Smith content to let them do the talking.

A finale capped off by an anthemic Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors is duly punctured by beery singalongs and far-flung lager cups. Business as usual, then – but what business it is.