After twenty years at the center of Editors, Tom Smith is finally making a record under his own name, and he does it by circling back to where it all began. There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light is Smith at his most unguarded. The big choruses and widescreen tension of his band are swapped for something warmer and closer. Acoustic guitars, soft strings, and the kind of songwriting that comes from sitting alone with a melody and seeing where it leads.

Smith reunited with producer Iain Archer for this one, the same collaborator he worked with during the Tired Pony era with Peter Buck and Gary Lightbody. The familiarity shows. Across ten songs, they have built a world that moves easily from the hushed, Nick Drake-like fingerpicking of “Broken Time” to the late-night glow of “The Lights of New York City.” Meanwhile, “Life Is For Living” anchors the album’s sense of renewal, a song born from a line Smith and Archer stumbled onto together. “Life is for living, anyway you want, life is for living, live it till it’s gone” became a kind of mission statement, a reminder that hope often shows up in the simplest phrasing.

There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn't There In The Light keeps expanding from there. “Life Is For Living” opens into a full anthem, the closest the album comes to Smith’s old widescreen instincts, while “Saturday” closes the set with a quiet pulse that lingers like a last conversation before sunrise. Throughout it, Smith threads themes of connection, memory, and resilience, leaning into the idea that the same truths exist in shadow and in daylight. It is a deeply human record, shaped by the desire to make something honest and unadorned after decades of volume and velocity.

For longtime Editors fans, this is a rare opportunity to hear Tom Smith without the armor. For Smith himself, it feels like a long overdue homecoming, a return to the raw beginnings that set everything in motion.