Editors share the single Seriously from their seventh album

Editors have put out Seriously, the third song to surface from their seventh studio album. Surface, Echo & Sound arrives on 30 October through Play It Again Sam, and follows The Rush and Call It In, both released earlier this year.

The album was made by getting back in a room. The band regrouped in rural Gloucestershire in the summer of 2025 and wrote together in person for the first time in years, a setup frontman Tom Smith compared to their earliest rehearsals in Stafford. Smith described the location to Under the Radar as an innocuous little industrial estate not far from where he lives, and noted it was about as far from a Berlin club as the band could get.

Seriously sits at the new wave end of what Editors do, driven by chiming guitars rather than the electronics of their last record. The lyric is about finding a way forward when life turns dark, which Smith argues is what most of his best-known lines are actually about, whatever the reputation says.

That reputation is the thing he keeps pushing against. Smith pointed out to Under the Radar that when people show him tattoos of his lyrics or ask him to write lines down, the lines they pick carry love and warmth rather than gloom. Taken out of the arrangement and the delivery, he says, those words are not dark at all.

The stripped-back approach came from his solo work. Smith took an acoustic-first route into the new material, in the vein of his own record There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn't There In The Light, which is a marked change of direction after 2022's EBM, made with Blanck Mass.

Editors have been a fixture of the British rock charts for two decades. Formed in Birmingham in 2002, they have put out seven studio albums and every one has reached the UK top 10; the 2005 debut The Back Room earned a Mercury Prize nomination, An End Has A Start topped the chart in 2007 and picked up a BRIT nomination, and In This Light And On This Evening went to number one in 2009.

No tracklist or tour dates were attached to the single. The album date and the label are what is confirmed, and both are now on the release calendar alongside the rest of the autumn schedule. Their Birmingham contemporaries have had a similar run of returns this year, with Bloc Party sharing Pigwig from a Trevor Horn-produced album and Interpol adding shows around their tour with the same band.