With 2005's The Back Room, The Editors rode the crest of the New Wave new wave on the strength of that staggering debut. Frontman Tom Smith's caustic missives framed a narrative of darkened bars and darker hearts. The Back Room's brooding atmospherics conjured images of dreary North England suburbia, and rain sodden city streets being glumly stumbled down in the small hours of the morning. It was the perfect album to stew over your break-up to. With just enough light to see you through to the end.

Critics fell over themselves, brandishing their Permanent LPs and proclaiming the band the "UK Interpol". And it has been largely these two comparisons that have dogged them since, which may be fair when comparing vocal styles, but overlooks other influences which permeate the Editors' sound: from Kitchen of Distinction, to U2 and Wire, to Big Country, Echo and the Bunnymen and Radiohead. All these figure in the mix on the band's sophomore outing, An End Has A Start.

I ask bassist Russell Leetch if there is such thing as geographical influence on a sound, or if he and his bandmates just grew up on a huge diet of post punk?

"That's the thing – not really. We're all kids of the nineties. So Ian Curtis was dead before any of us were born. We didn't grow up listening to stuff like that, we grew up listening to Nirvana and Oasis and Blur. And then Doves and Spiritualized and Elbow. And Radiohead were a big band for us. Being sixteen and having OK Computer come out was amazing – that transports you to another place."

The Editors' youth is often masked by Smith's world-weary baritone and his propensity towards morose subject matters. The band met at University in Birmingham in 2000, where they were all studying music; "recording and studio stuff. We tend to leave that to the professionals now. University taught us to be very, very amateur. As soon as you get into a real studio you realise you don't know anything."

An End Has A Start was recording in County Mead, Ireland, with U2 producer Jacknife Lee, who, fresh off working on the second albums of Bloc Party and Snow Patrol, seemed an obvious fit. "He's still young, (Lee) he's still enthusiastic. He wanted to work with our band. He was banging at our door to do this record. So we went to him over there, and had a great time making the album."

The way the Editors record, Leetch explains, is through working and waiting to catch moments of inspiration as they fall in the studio: "We never jam – we're not very good at that. We play it altogether and sometimes the ideas are completely contradictory and it doesn't work! And then sometimes we start playing and it just clicks right away. And when it does that's how it goes on the record. "

An End Has A Start was burdened with the weight of expectation that a whole raft of the new "the" bands had to stare down previously. Would the Strokes deliver on the follow up to This Is It? Would there be a second album to match Turn on the Bright Lights? Do you try and do something drastic to your sound, or give the people what they want? It seems a little damned if you do either way.

Leetch says that reviews have been mixed, but that doesn't seem to worry him overly; "The reviews have been very, very mixed. It's been a bit weird – what is one person's least favourite track is someone else's favourite. You can't let it sink in too much. It's all about exposure, really. People knowing that it's out there. People can make up their own minds and think that's what they generally do."

The particularly prickly British press can be a hard thing to deal with as a band on the up, he says. "The cynicism here in the UK sometimes is just unbelievable. They want everyone to lose. You can't be successful here. I think the bigger you get the more stick you get, just generally for being big. I mean, bands like Arcade Fire don't get any shit in the press, but you can see their influences just as easily as anybody else."

According to Leetch, the new material is hitting the mark live, with tailor made for big venues new single 'Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors' "getting a better response than (previous single) 'Munich', which is great. What we're going to do, is that we're going to release records. And as long as music fans buy them, that's all that matters."

Relaxing on a rare day off before heading to Paris for a weekend festival slot and then to their third billing at T in the Park in London, Leetch responds to my pitch for the strangest thing that's happened to him so far with a story about Paul Mccartney:

"Last week we played on Jools Holland and we were sitting in our dressing room. And we knew that Paul McCartney was on the show. So he just came into our dressing room and had a beer, and chatted. So when things like that happen, you can never plan for them. When you're just sitting there drinking beers and talking about guitars with a Beatle."