My relationship to the guitar is a strange one as a professional because I don’t need to hear the guitar all the time, all the way through songs. “Guitar work dips in and out all the way through. “I’m an anti-guitarist guitarist,” admits Lockey. Smith’s vocals and lyrics, however, remain crystal clear throughout, and the guitar work is beautiful – jangling at times, angular and riveting at others – and, importantly, restrained. The latter’s influence is tangible almost 20 years later in EBM’s immersive, indulgent bath of sound. Their first album was recorded with grunge maestro and producer extraordinaire Steve Albini, and the second, Ignoto in 2005, with Flood. Lockey’s own processes and focus have evolved since he joined the band in 2012, which followed eight years as the guitarist and producer for yourcodenameis:milo, a cult favourite championed by John Peel. When you evolve as a band and your influences and instrumentation changes, your process changes from less of a nervous energy into a more storied, layered process.” Back in the early days, the way the band sounded, you can do that band-in-a-room thing. We relish building it block by block, bit by bit, because there’s so many layers coming from so many parts of the band, that we focus on parts at a time. The pre-studio album was used as a framework for the live composition. Having that live human, physical aspect married to it in the studio was interesting because the record could have been finished just by what we’d done in lockdown, so we really went the extra mile to turn it into a band record.” What we took was an industrial, electronic record that we’d made remotely and then fused it with all the band elements. “My role is usually the recording of live instruments and producing. “I’m an old-school studio guy,” Lockey says. They chose one in “the middle of nowhere”, Chapel Studio in Lincolnshire, where the pre-Lockey Editors recorded their Mercury-nominated 2005 debut album The Back Room. The album could, theoretically, have been finished remotely, but the vibrancy, the hugeness of feeling and sound that live instruments imbue are irreplaceable – and, as a musician since his school days, there was no question of getting into a studio for Lockey. So it got to a fully formed place before we even thought about going into an actual studio.” The new addition to the band, Ben produces, Elliott produces, I produce. “Everyone would work on a chunk, pass it onto the next, then it would go around in circles like that. “We all live in opposite ends of the country, so a lot of what we did was throwing ideas around,” Lockey says. Four years after 2018’s Violence, the band’s seventh album EBM keeps one foot in stadium-ready anthems while also kicking back in time to a 1980s nightclub, enveloping their guitars in the glitzy, gothic synth stylings of The Smiths and New Order.Įditors’ decade-long lead guitarist Justin Lockey is on the line from his South Yorkshire home to discuss his dual roles as lead guitarist and producer, both of which he traces back to a fortuitous 2005 meeting and friendship with the acclaimed producer Flood (Depeche Mode, U2, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins). When critics follow Depeche Mode with references like Joy Division and U2, it’s not just mindless reverence but rooted in the evidence. Twenty years since the Birmingham band formed – and a couple of label and line-up tweaks later – the six-piece now boasts two platinum studio albums, a Mercury Prize nomination, and a steady stream of tours and festival performances. READ MORE: “We could spend years trying to understand them on on a physics level, or we could automate it”: Neural DSP’s Doug Castro on how machine learning can surpass human understanding of amplifiers.Like a swarthy, younger Dave Gahan, Smith blends gothic drama with sweeping New Romantic stylings on Picturesque as if he’s a direct descendant of Depeche Mode. When Editors frontman Tom Smith croons, “ No-one will love you more than I do/I can promise you that,” you want to believe him.
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