Spelling Melancholy 'P-O-P': Editors

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EDITORS CREATE GLOOMY post-punk guitar songs, which are often accompanied by arty videos, and the English quartet's second CD, "An End Has a Start," features at least four songs about death — and the rest sound like meditations for the midnight hour.

But singer Tom Smith — he of the melancholic lyrics and sober voice — wants you to know Editors are a pop band.

"We do take our music very serious, and the songs, compared to a lot of pop music, try to deal with serious things, and I wouldn't have it any other way," he said. "But over this past summer, and touring [behind our debut CD, 2005's] 'The Back Room' and the success we kind of had, you also notice when we're playing a song like 'Munich' off the first record, there are people there dancing, singing their hearts out, enjoying it like they do — the song means beyond what I meant when I wrote it and it means what it does to them. And when you see people enjoying your music like that, it goes beyond just being a serious band. It's a pop band."

"An End Has a Start" picks up where "The Back Room" left off, but with the sublime additions of piano, choirs and strings on certain songs to flesh out the arrangements. But chiming, soaring, arena-sized guitars still define Editors, and there's nothing that can be done about the forlorn timbre of Smith's voice — which is for the best. His deep, brooding and charismatic singing makes even a relatively hopeful song such as the new album's "Push Your Head Towards the Air" sound like a eulogy.

While Smith's pipes can't lighten the mood, they do lend appropriate gravitas to songs with darker content, such as "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors," one of the CD's songs that focuses on mortality.

"The whole record's not about death; there are just a few songs that touch on it," said Smith, 26. "It's inevitable as you get older that every now and again things happen in your life, or around your life, that stop you and make you think more than you had before. Just a couple of things had happened and I couldn't stop thinking about them."

"Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors" is a remembrance of the first time Smith encountered death. The chorus lyrics state:

I can't shake this feeling I've got
My dirty hands, have I been in the wars?
The saddest thing that I'd ever seen
Were smokers outside the hospital doors

"With that lyric and with that song, it's something from childhood, really," Smith said. "When you're a kid, those thoughts about things coming to an end are a million miles a way — as well they should be. I didn't have to go to hospital more than anyone else, but on occasion when you go into that environment and you open your eyes you go, 'S***.' These things are very real, and thoughts you never thought of before, and images you've never seen before, are suddenly in the flesh confronting you. Those moments came back to me when I was writing those lyrics and when we were writing this record.

"As you get older, someone passing away who's near you — I don't know, of course it's terribly sad, but you do come to realize it's part of life, it's inevitable," he said. "And in a lot of ways, there are a lot more scary, terrifying things that happen in the world. You can just turn on the news or pick up a newspaper.

"There was a point in my life where going to a hospital, or seeing disease, was terrifying and the worst thing I had ever seen. But as you get older, you realize it's actually not."

The second single from "An End Has a Start" is the title track, and with lyrics such as "You came on your own / That's how you leave" and "More and more people I know are getting ill," it too could be considered one of the death meditations.

But Smith said, "That song is the biggest pop song we've ever made. It's melody — we tried to outdo ourselves with every hook. Over the course of three and a half minutes, like a rollercoaster ride — as great pop songs should be. It was our attempt, anyway."

The accompanying video was also Editor's attempt to make a pop video, but like everything the band touches, it's anything but bright and shiny. Even though there are nearly three dozen girls dancing around the handsome lads, the video still feels like a post-apocalyptic indie-rock take on Michael Jackson's "Thriller."

"We've made a number of videos, and some of them are more arty, or serious, or thought provoking, that go with the type of music and the type of band we are," Smith said. "But we do try to make melodic pop songs as well, so with this video we just though, '[Forget] it, let's have some dancing girls. When I look at it now — yeah, I know there are 16, 20 girls in high tights dancing around to our song, but it also looks surprisingly arty and less straightforward than I thought it was going to look."

Still, beneath Editors' all-black exterior is a group of content souls who love being in a band — pop or otherwise — and Smith said recording "An End Has a Start" was a relatively easy process, with zero sophomore-album jitters.

"The whole process was fun. We're a band — we should enjoy being creative," he said. "I'm sure there's going to be records in the future where we want to kill each other, but right now the confidence is high. ... Remembering why we wanted to be in a band in the first place."

» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; with Ra Ra Riot and Biffy Clyro, Tue., 7 p.m., $15; 202-265-0930. (U St.-Cardozo)

Photos by Daragh McDonagh (top) and Tamin Jones