“No Sound but the Wind” by Editors

Editors had been playing "No Sound but the Wind" since Glastonbury in 2008, but it first reached the shops in 2009 on the soundtrack to The Twilight Saga: New Moon, as a demo whose lyrics differ from the version the band finally settled on. Tom Smith wrote it after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and you can feel that book's ash-grey chill in it: a slow, bleak hymn, Smith's voice moving through the emptiness like the last man walking. He produced it too, and the writing credit is shared with Chris Urbanowicz, Russell Leetch and Ed Lay.

The song kept changing shape on stage and grew into a fan favourite. The 2010 single was a live take from Belgium's Rock Werchter, and it went to number one there, their second Belgian chart-topper after "Papillon", later going platinum; it was never released in the UK. A full-band version surfaced on the Unedited box set, and a piano version on Violence.

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