Five Questions With Lauren Mayberry (Chvrches)

Chvrches frontwoman Lauren Mayberry is currently on an extensive tour in support her first solo album, Vicious Creature (EMI/Island). Its songs have their origins in the 10th anniversary of her Glasgow trio’s 2013 synth-pop masterpiece, The Bones Of What You Believe, a milestone that had her contemplating her evolution as an artist. In the process, Mayberry reconnected with her inner music fan, whether it was ’90s British girl groups like All Saints and Sugababes, ’80s new-wave staple Annie Lennox or indie-rock den mothers Jenny Lewis and Sleater-Kinney.

Stylistically speaking, Vicious Creature runs the gamut, from Britpop and mainstream rock to piano balladry and acoustic strumming. The lineup of heavyweight collaborators includes Caroline Pennell (Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez), Ethan Gruska (Belle Brigade) and Grammy winners Tobias Jesso Jr. (Adele, Harry Styles) and Matthew Koma (Shania Twain, Hilary Duff). A few of the album’s strongest tracks were cowritten with Mayberry’s good friend Dan McDougall (Liam Gallagher, Jade Bird), and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith shows up to lend a hand on piano. She also reunited with Greg Kurstin, who produced much of Chvrches’ 2018 LP, Love Is Dead.

Mayberry spoke more about Vicious Creature with MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland.

After more than a decade with Chvrches, why did you feel compelled to release a solo album? Or perhaps a more appropriate question would be: Why did it take so long?
It felt like there was a natural breather happening in the band. We’d reached the end of the label contract we were on and had been together for 10 years. It seemed like a logical time to take stock of everything and take a minute to just be people—outside of being the people who make up that band. I’m so proud of everything we’ve built and excited about what we’ll do next, but it’s only natural to have creative curiosity for other ways of working when you’ve been in one place for so long. So much of this was me giving myself permission to make things outside the band, whether it’s solo material or things that never see the light of day. I didn’t feel like I could do that for a long time, and it’s really been a shot in the arm for my mind and spirit.

How was your approach to the writing and recording of Vicious Creature different from anything you’ve done with Chvrches?
I think of the two worlds as quite distinct. So much of what I know about songwriting is because of Chvrches—and we’re the sum of our experiences. But I was never trying to recreate that. If anything, I wanted to have experiences that were very different from the kind of collaboration we do in the band. I wanted to learn different things about myself and my process that I wouldn’t know if I stayed in a space that was more familiar to me. In either the band world or the solo world, I’ve learned that I need to feel comfortable and safe in a studio in order to write anything good—and that I have good instincts and should be kinder to myself when it comes to trusting them, whether it’s about people or A&R.

You drew on a vast array of influences for this album—and it shows. Tell us more about that.
I didn’t want to just be doing a crap version of a Chvrches album. I wanted to investigate influences or ways of writing that didn’t make sense for the band. We overlap on a lot of our influences but are all quite different people with quite different tastes. I think it’s natural and healthy to want to explore those, whether that’s PJ Harvey, Sinead O’Connor, Grace Jones, David Byrne … whoever. I don’t think every moment of being creative has to be fun necessarily, but do I think there should be some kind of joy in the discovery more often than not. I’d lost my spark a little bit when it came to some parts of it, and that’s what I wanted to discover.

How did the various collaborations dictate the direction of Vicious Creature?
At first, I just wanted to push myself out of the nest a little bit and see who I connected with and what any dynamic that wasn’t Chvrches would look like. There were a lot of songs that didn’t make the cut, but I think it was important for me to get my 10,000 hours started in this new head space and just challenge myself to create differently. It was really interesting to go back and work with Greg Kurstin on “Sunday Best,” as he worked on the third Chvrches album with us. He’s such a generous and inspiring person—creatively and otherwise—and it was quite surreal in a way to work with someone so familiar, but on something so different to what we’d done before. Dan McDougall also became a really important part of the record. We’d known each other socially for a while, and I knew he was an amazing musician. But we’d never written together, so it was a very pleasant surprise when we sat down and wrote songs like “Something In The Air” and “Oh, Mother,” which ended up being some of my favorites on the album.

How might the creative inroads you’ve made on your first solo album influence the next Chvrches album?
I’m excited to see what everyone brings to the table now that we’ve had some space and time reflect and reload. A reasonable amount of the solo conversation feels like it’s been framed quite negatively, as if I’m doing it to spite the band. But I think it’s ended up being quite a healthy thing for the band. I can’t speak for Iain (Cook) and Martin (Doherty), but I’m sure they’d agree that the conversations we’re having now feel a lot more positive and exciting than a few years ago. For me, I’m more confident in my storytelling and my gut instincts when it comes to narratives, stories and world-building. That’s something I started leaning into on the last Chvrches album, but it was hard to know whether that would only last for the Screen Violence era, because it was quite a specific concept that had a lot of places we could go visually. Now I know it’s an important part of the creative process for me, especially in the early stages—and the rest of the band seemed excited about it when we spoke. Time will tell.

See Lauren Mayberry live.