The four years since their previous album have seen some major changes for Editors. The lead guitarist Chris Urbanowicz left the band in 2012 due to musical differences and two new members, Justin Lockey and Elliott Williams, joined. Their new album, The Weight of Your Love, is then inevitably a rather different affair.

Yet despite the loss of Urbanowicz’s distinctive tremolo-style lead guitar, The Weight of Your Love is still a cracking album – but in a different way to Editors’ previous albums. ‘The Weight’ and ‘Sugar’ provide an intense opening to the album with strong guitar riffs and Smith’s moody vocals which have become so characteristic of the band.

The lead single ‘A Ton of Love’ follows, again with strong guitar riffs but dependent this time on the chorus. Despite many fans desperate to associate this song with other bands, particularly Echo & the Bunnymen, ‘A Ton of Love’ has its own merit, proving to be very catchy and an obvious choice for the first single.

Other stand-out songs include the drum-led ‘Formaldehyde’ and the beautifully melodious ‘The Phone Book’. Editors have moved away from the experimental vibe of In This Light and On This Evening (which, by the way, I very much enjoyed despite split public opinion), but ‘What is This Thing Called Love’ is experimental in another way – it is sung almost entirely in falsetto, creating a haunting but beautiful song with fantastic vocals and atmospheric strings.

The Weight of Your Love also comes as a deluxe edition with three extra songs plus acoustic version of ‘Hyena’ and ‘Nothing’. Although I’ve found in the past that deluxe editions sometimes contain hidden treasures (as with Onerepublic’s acoustic version of ‘Burning Bridges’ from their latest album Native), the Editors’ deluxe-edition songs are mediocre at best after the album itself. Personally, I wouldn’t waste the extra money.

The Weight of Your Love proves that despite the loss of a lead guitarist, a band can still be just as successful. The only bugbear I have with Editors’ fourth album is that, because of Urbanowicz’s departure, the version of ‘Two Hearted Spider’ that made the album is far, far inferior to the 2011 version. It was very disappointing to hear the new version from the album, and although it is still a fairly good song, the original version far surpasses it and is, in fact, one of my favourite songs of theirs.

Editors’ fourth album, however, has necessarily had to take a new direction to cope with the loss of Urbanowicz. Although The Weight of Your Love is almost completely different to the likes of The Back Room, it still remains an accomplished album, and one that will provide many hours of happy listening this summer.