Editors have broken a three-year recorded silence. The Birmingham post-punk band released "Call It In" today via Play It Again Sam, their first new single since the 2022 album EBM. Alongside the song, they've mapped out a sprawling 30-date UK and European tour for early 2027, capped by a headline show at London's O2 Academy Brixton on March 11.
Frontman Tom Smith described the song as a product of the band getting back to basics. "We spent a lot of summer '25 holed up in rural Gloucestershire, working on songs with all of us in a room, in a more traditional band set up," Smith said via press release. "'Call It In' is a song about asking for help, really, in the presence of an existential dread, finding solace and comfort in someone close, escaping the deafening noise of modern life."
The track's accompanying video was directed by guitarist Justin Lockey, keeping the visual in-house and suggesting a tighter creative loop for the band's next chapter. It arrives after a relatively fallow stretch for Editors as a unit; Smith released his debut solo album, There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn't There In The Light, last December and supported it with a UK and European run earlier this spring.
The 2027 tour begins January 26 in Rouen, France, and winds through mainland Europe before crossing to the UK and Ireland for a February 28 start in Dublin. The run includes stops in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Prague, Berlin, Copenhagen, Cologne, and Hamburg before the UK leg visits Belfast, Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Bristol, and Southampton alongside that Brixton closer.
Before all of that, though, Editors have a notable summer date. They'll open the new Warehouse venue at Villa Park in Birmingham on July 9, a 3,500-capacity room that gives the city another mid-sized room for touring bands. Playing the inaugural show at their hometown's newest venue feels pointed; Editors have always worn their Birmingham roots proudly, even as their audience tilted increasingly continental through the 2010s.
Editors occupy a strange position in the post-punk ecosystem: wildly popular across mainland Europe (they regularly headline festivals and fill arenas in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) while remaining a cult draw in North America. Their catalog runs seven albums deep, from the jagged debut The Back Room (2005) through the synthier pivot of In Dream (2015) to EBM's dancefloor-adjacent pulse. "Call It In" suggests the Gloucestershire sessions may be pulling them back toward something more organic and brooding, though it's early to call a full direction change from a single track.
No word yet on whether "Call It In" signals a forthcoming album or exists as a standalone release, but the length of the tour and the return to full-band writing sessions make the former seem likely. Either way, three years without new Editors material was long enough.