Tom Smith

Twenty years on from Editors’ debut, Tom Smith makes a sideways move with none of the drama of a clean break. His first solo record isn’t an escape route from the band—still very much alive and active—but a way of bringing the original core of his writing back into focus. Ideas sketched out a decade ago, left hanging between tours and stylistic detours, finally click into place. After "EBM"—an album on which Smith felt less central than usual—and the strange suspension of the pandemic years, the impulse hardens into a blunt question: <>. Even a tentative attempt to restart the Smith & Burrows thread only points him in the opposite direction: this time he needs something less “in tandem,” less negotiated, closer to the songs’ ground zero.

The title, lifted from “Deep Dive,” reads like a mission statement: what we fear in the dark is simply a portion of the same light that’s always been there. It’s a record that looks inward without masks, turning the noisy, relentless present into a place to search for connection rather than shelter. Smith calls it the most honest album he’s ever made, and you can hear why: Editors’ theatrical ambiguity gives way to grown-up candour, an intimacy that doesn’t require staging.

Anyone expecting a showcase for that famously huge range (4.75 octaves, as the Daily Mirror noted back in 2014) will be surprised. The voice here is deliberately exposed—fragile, shaded, human. It isn’t trying to impress; it’s trying to tell the truth. The arrangements stay close to the bone—guitar, piano, restrained strings, cinematic touches, horns only when they genuinely earn their keep—because once you strip away volume and theatre, there’s nowhere left to hide.

Key to the whole process is Iain Archer (Snow Patrol, Jake Bugg, James Bay; twice an Ivor Novello Award winner): less a producer than a hard-edged creative ally, the kind who asks you to rewrite, cut, throw away what doesn’t land. The sessions happen in bursts—two or three days at a time—broken up by tours and returns, a stop-start rhythm that lets songs settle and sharpen their emotional weight. Only later do other players step in with targeted contributions, which is why “Leave”—the record’s lone proper rock window—feels like a sudden opening without breaking the overall spell.

“Deep Dive” becomes the emotional compass: solitude tipping into communion, the sense of being accompanied even when the world feels far away. And in the grain of it you can hear a kinship with the R.E.M. Smith has long loved, with "Automatic for the People" as a formative touchstone. No direct borrowing—just a shared spirit: the voice as something vulnerable rather than dominant, the acoustic care, and that way of letting places speak like interior mirrors.

Across the album, two recurring symbols in Smith’s writing fall into a new alignment: light and noise. With Editors, noise often meant the turmoil of the world and the mind, and light arrived as a flash of revelation—sometimes uneasy, sometimes harsh. Here the contrast settles. Noise recedes into the background; light becomes a space of clarity and truth. The songs aren’t diaristic, yet they’re deeply autobiographical in emotional substance: “How Many Times” turns London into living memory; “Endings Are Breaking My Heart” transforms a catalogue of farewells into a hushed hymn to transience; “Broken Time” lives on subtraction and silence; “Life Is For Living” swells with carefully calibrated orchestration, never tipping into triumph.

Among the high points is “Souls”: a slightly unruly rush of feeling, anchored by a chorus so direct it turns disorientation into an act of alliance. “Lights Of New York City” casts a soft trumpet over a freezing night, using New York as a symbol for time slipping through your fingers. “Northern Line” is the most explicit confession—friendships (Andy Burrows), pubs, familiar streets, and the impossibility of truly returning to who you were. And “Saturday” closes with a quiet, tender grace: piano, voice, a simple 'talk to me' that leaves a light on, like the end of a night in low lamps.

The clearest proof of this artistic choice sits outside the record, too. Smith has been taking these songs on the road in acoustic form—small rooms, minimal support, very few safety nets. He’s admitted it scares him more than stepping onto a huge stage with Editors, because there you can lean on volume and the machinery of the show. Here you can’t. Here it’s just the song, and the person singing it.

"There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light" is the album Smith pursued without rushing, letting it ripen over years. It isn’t a goodbye to Editors, and it isn’t a brand-new beginning either: it’s a parallel line, a branch that opens up so an adult artist can speak in the most honest voice of his trajectory. A record that asks for silence and attention—and returns depth and beauty without raising its voice, because it doesn’t need to.

10/01/2026