To Lose My Life… by White Lies

To Lose My Life..., the debut album from White Lies, came out on Fiction Records on 19 January 2009, and it went straight to number one in the UK. The Ealing trio of singer and guitarist Harry McVeigh, bassist Charles Cave and drummer Jack Lawrence-Brown had shed their old name, Fear of Flying, in 2007, then sat on their first gig for five months to let the buzz build; Fiction signed them within days of it.

Ed Buller and Max Dingel produced the album at ICP Studios in Belgium and Kore Studios in London, and it's big, brooding post-punk with the synth drama and gloom turned up for the arena: dark songs with bright choruses. "Unfinished Business", "Death" and "To Lose My Life" arrived before it, "Farewell to the Fairground" after, and the band had already been tipped on the BBC's Sound of 2009 list. America got it that March.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.