White Lies couldn’t be more polished. With a steely, monochrome look that encompasses everything from their hair to their website and a sound of such searing, astral intensity that it makes Editors seem uncouth, the West London three-piece are almost too clinical for their own good.

But with their first two singles, ‘Death’ and ‘Unfinished Business’, proving that there’s more to this lot than just an impressive PR campaign, and an eagerly awaited debut album in the can for 2009, there really is absolutely no doubt that Harry McVeigh, Charles Cave and Jack Lawrence-Brown (oh yes… they’re very posh) are going to be quite literally massive in the year of the ox.

Already signed to Fiction and with their first headline tour of the States due to kick off later this year (despite only forming in 2007), for these lads you’d be forgiven for thinking ‘the future looks bright… the future looks white’.
We caught up with White Lies guitarist and head scribbler Charles Cave to find out what all the fuss was about (and to try and establish if they really aren’t just a boy band)…

“Well I suppose it is just about ‘death’ really,” explains Cave on the band’s latest single, named – you’ve guessed it – ‘Death’. “Sort of a fear of dying and all the questions that you think about in relation to death, like when will it happen, will anyone care and all this sort of stuff. It was a thought that originally came from the metaphor of being an aeroplane.”

Right, so that’s cleared that up then. And what about the bizarre video? Kids riding around on bikes in the night? Ethereal light emerging from fringes? Slo-mo images of spilt milk? All very deep…

“Yeah, with the video we were on tour at the time so we let everyone know the kind of vibe we wanted and our label sent out the offer to a load of directors and we got like 20, 30 ideas and scripts back and this was the only idea that stood out. It wasn’t just a really black and white, really morbid, monochrome thing and we just thought that it had so much character.

“His initial ideas, his shots and angles and his influences were things that we were really into in terms of other directors and filmmakers. So, it just sounded perfect really and we had loads of confidence in it and were really, really happy with how it turned out.

“It’s not meant to be a story from start to finish. It is just sort of showing soulless characters from parts of society – all the parents have no faces and the kids are kind of meant to be angels of death. They look really innocent but they are also kind of menacing at the same time.”

In a genre that’s so characteristically derivative, White Lies stand out as an indie band that strive to write songs about the more high-brow aspects of life. Elevating himself from the Fratellis of this world is something that comes naturally to Cave (who writes all the band’s lyrics), as someone who is interested in the bigger, more metaphysical themes of song-writing.

“I think at the end of the day we just want to make music that doesn’t feel as though it’s attached to any particular moment in time, and when there’s other bands writing about what they’ve just done the previous weekend and making references to stuff that’s not gonna make sense in 20, 30 years time, we’d rather do something different.

“I’m more interested in universal questions and concepts and ideas and stuff like that, so I guess that’s what we write about and I hope that means that our music will last for a long time.”

Deep! Not to be outdone by the lyrical themes of big, spiritual questions, the sound White Lies produce is equally epic; with stark, pounding intros building with slow intensity into soaring choruses on the first two singles.
Cave cites Interpol and Secret Machines as influences and the band have been compared to U2, Joy Division and even Tears For Fears, but the truth is they sound more like Editors than anyone.

So what of this impressively polished concoction… How much of it is a product of the band themselves and how much is dreamed up in the studio by impressive knob-twiddlers, Ed Buller (Suede, Pulp) and Max Dingle (Muse, The Killers) who were hauled in for the first record?

“That’s exactly how we write the songs,” says Cave, of the band’s intense sound. “Harry (McVeigh) and I usually write the songs using kind of string section sounds on a keyboard. We don’t really use guitars when we write them at all, so from day one we want it to sound very cinematic and very powerful.

“We always have that in mind from the outset and everything else is kind of built around that. That’s why there’s really a lot of space in our music because we start with a just a few sounds and when there’s no room for guitars or no room for bass we just keep it with the vocal and with the atmospherics because that’s the most important thing for us.” Consider yourselves told.

Cave does at least conceive that the band’s impressive production team had some influence on the album (due out early 2009).

“Ed Buller had really good visions for the band and had worked a lot with string sections as well which was something we really wanted to include on the album, so we decided to do a co-production (with him and Dingle) and it was really good. It turned out to be a really interesting dynamic while we were recording.

“I don’t think they changed the songs too much.

“It was more that they just brought out the best qualities in each song and were able to hear when things might not be working and when things really worked.

“Ed’s (Buller) dad was a classical composer and so Ed has grown up around that type of music and has a really vast knowledge of classical music and of conducting and arranging as well as writing. He actually does a lot of film scores and TV scores and stuff so he was really able to give us that extra dimension that we wouldn’t have had otherwise or, at least, would have struggled to achieve.

“We had quite a large string section in London for a couple of days for some of the tracks and stuff like that, so for the instrumentation he was really good and really influential, but we have our way of writing so it is quite hard for people to intrude on that really.”

White Lies played their first gig earlier this year and it’s already clear that they’re gonna be huge. They may be one of the most hyped bands we’ve encountered for some time, but – the truth is – if we said we didn’t quite like them it would be a lie… A white lie.