The Editors’ rapidly growing legion of fans sent the group’s recent single, Munich, into the Top 30 — and by the time you read this, its successor, Blood, will surely propel them into the realm of Popworld and CD:UK. But if everything’s mustard, you wouldn’t necessarily know it after a while immersed in the monochrome hinterlands of The Back Room.

Therein, of course, lies the predominant charm of these songs: the ectoplasmic squall of Lights; the four-to-the- floor whiteout of Someone Says; and the austere whipcrack of All Sports. Even when Tom Smith’s elliptical paeans to the human condition stay just the wrong side of helpful, his singing radiates a thoroughly believable edge of existential alarm. Which, in the circumstances, is just as well. With peers such as Maximo Park and British Sea Power boasting formidable wordsmiths in their ranks, who can blame Smith for keeping lines such as “we’ll look in the back room where we hide all of our feelings” off the CD booklet? Suffice it to say, lyrics that look a little sixth-formy on paper need a hell of a band to give them life, and that’s one thing that Smith has at his disposal. Behold the adrenalised clatter that pushes his fretful intonations forward on Blood: “Blood runs through your feet/That’s where our similarity ends,” sings Smith, before giving way to a rising torrent of finger-shredding noise.

The Back Room harks back to a pre-Oasis time when indie bands observed an important distinction between making a big beautiful noise and yielding to rock’s more priapic excesses. Much of the credit here must go to the drummer, Ed Lays, who had yet to be born when his closest musical relation, Stephen Morris, pounded his way through several of Joy Division’s finest moments.

As Lays and the bassist, Russell Leetch, drill an almost oppressive military momentum into these songs, it’s left to the guitarist, Chris Urbanowicz, to soften the picture with a series of FX-heavy power chords. “I’m so glad I found this,” sings Smith on Munich. Circumstantial evidence suggests that he might be singing about the box in which his parents have hidden all their old indie records — but The Back Room is no worse an album for that.

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