Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of British rock band Editors' third studio album.
• Just before Christmas 2008, prior to hooking with In This Light And On This Evening producer Flood, the Editors went into a London studio and recorded the album's title track. What they came up was an indication of the new electronic industrial sound they would develop for the record. Frontman Tom Smith told the News of the World September 20, 2009: "That song got us thinking about things like the Blade Runner soundtrack and The Terminator theme. The way the song builds, its sense of drama, the mood that the synthesisers create across the first two or three minutes - it rocked in a different way to anything we'd done before."
• Smith's home city of London dominates In This Light And On This Evening, both lyrically and musically. He said in press materials: "'I actually think it's in every song. In the right time and place, in the right light and on the right evening, something you have seen 1,000 times before can still take your breath away whilst the background of electronic whirrs and hums that run under many of the tracks mimic the constant background noise of the city."
• CMU asked bassist Russ Leetch what inspired the In This Light and On This Evening album. He replied: "We watched sci-fi films when we were twelve years old. They all said 'in the near future' or 'the year is 2010' in a monotone deep voice. We created the soundtrack to that image, but in the year they used to call 'the future.'"