If you love driving fast with the windows rolled down playing top 40 radio at full volume and you play in a band, you usually have one goal: get your songs out of your garage and into the worlds’ collective car speakers as soon as humanly possible. Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook, and Martin Doherty certainly fit this bill. They unabashedly adore music of the wind-in-your-hair variety. And, of course, they play in a band, the Scottish synth pop group, CHVRCHES.
And yet … Since emerging in 2013 with the glistening brightness of their breakthrough single, “Recover,” CHVRCHES have always projected an insularity, a subtle but unmistakable wariness about leaning into their obvious Hit Song of the Summer-writing potential. At their core, CHVRCHES are true blue Glaswegian punks. They’ve wanted to protect themselves, and protect that undercurrent of melancholy that gives depth to their sunniness.
They have historically produced every piece of music themselves, including their 2013 debut, The Bones of What You Believe, and 2015 follow-up, Every Open Eye. “Certainly not,” was their go-to response, Martin recalls laughing, when asked to consider collaboration. “We knew that if you get led down the wrong path it can completely derail your career.” But if there’s a theme in CHVRCHES’ world as they prepare to release their third record, Love Is Dead, it’s willful, determined openness, both ideologically - more on that in a minute – and in terms of actual creative process.
This conscious move towards openness in the creative process reflects a bigger, deeper existential theme as well. “We live in a time where the death of empathy is pretty evident,” Lauren explains. “You turn on the news and see story after story about how selfish and unkind people are, but also stories of strength and resilience and resistance. How do we deal with both those things?” That question, of how to honor our justifiable despair about the state of the world, while moving towards hope and love, mirrors CHVRCHES’ sonic blend of dualities. As Lauren exhorts in “ii”, the instrumental / spoken word intro to album closer “Wonderland”:
Truth exists somewhere between the dark and the light
It’s that quest for balance that runs throughout Love Is Dead.
Lead single “Get Out” is a sprawling crescendo of heartbroken joy, and the album’s opening track, “Graffiti,” with it’s lilting syncopated backbeat follows suit. “Wrote our names along the bathroom walls, graffiti-ing our hearts across the stalls,” Lauren sings. “I’ve been waiting for my whole life to grow old and now we never will.” The song captures a sense of perspective on the passage of time. “Growing up and realizing things aren’t going to be the way you thought they would be,” the singer explains. “The feeling of Stand By Me, ‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, did you?’”
The band doesn’t consider their music expressly political, per se, but the urgent, brightly haunted “Graves,” with lyrics like “they’re leaving bodies in stairwells and washing up on the shore/you can look away while they’re dancing on our graves/if you don’t have a heart I can offer you mine,” feels abject and despairing yet joyful in a decidedly topical way. And on, “Miracle,” Mayberry questions “I feel like but I’m falling but I’m trying to fly, where does all the good go?”
Unlike her bandmates, who, by the time CHVRCHES formed, had already logged a lot of years in other groups, Lauren’s entrée to the rock and roll life was more trial by fire. “I was 23 when I met Iain, 24 when we started this band and I’m thirty now,” she recalls. “I’ve had to grow up in front of people.” From the very beginning, “there was a lot of trepidation on my part,” she recalls. “As a woman in any industry but especially as a woman in the entertainment industry, I knew how people talk about you. How they perceive you. Even before the first record came out I could see all these monsters in the trees already. Some of those monsters turned out to be real. Some of them did not.”
That’s a lot of what Love Is Dead is about: growing up, “coming to terms with the fact that there are great things in the world and there are awful things in the world and that you can’t get one without the other,” Lauren says. It’s that duality, again. “We’re fucked, the world is fucked,” Iain summarizes, with a smile. “But there’s an ellipses at the end. It’s Love Is Dead…. Like, how did we get to this point? And how do we move on from this point? It’s Love Is Dead, we’re fucked, what’s next?”
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By Jessica Ramirez