IN January this year, Glasgow synth-pop trio CHVRCHES wiped their band’s social media pages and posted a short music video captioned with the instruction “Get In”. It was a teaser for Get Out, their first new output since 2016 and a soaring, impressive first cut from forthcoming album Love Is Dead, which is out on Friday.
Following their 2013 top-10 debut LP The Bones Of What You Believe and 2015’s top-five follow-up Every Open Eye, Love Is Dead sees Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty collaborating with others for the first time on an album since forming CHVRCHES in a Glasgow basement back in 2011.
Just two years later they were guests on NBC’s Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon playing The Mother We Share, a slab of goth-tinged electropop which featured in the opening ceremony of the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games and went on to break them worldwide. Just denting the UK top 40, it remains their highest chart-rating to date.
Whether that changes with the huge, festival-ready pop of Love Is Dead seems immaterial. It’s not through megahits or being played on TV shows such as Gray’s Anatomy, CSI and Lucifer that CHVRCHES made their name – a name styled with a “v” simply to distinguish the band from places of worship on internet searches. Rather, their worldwide reputation was earned through touring hard graft, a discipline they’d each developed through Cook and Doherty’s previous band Aerogramme and Mayberry’s early outfits Boyfriend/Girlfriend and Blue Sky Archives.
In the few weeks up to their appearance at Glasgow’s TRNSMT on July 8, they play the top tier of musical festivals in New York – where the trio currently live – as well as in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Portugal.
After TRNSMT, the first Scottish date CHVRCHES have made in two years, they go on to play 5000-seat theatres in Australia, Japan and the US. It was in America – Los Angeles to be precise – where Love Is Dead was largely written and recorded, with the band first working with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics and Matt Berninger from The National early in 2017. It’s Berninger’s croon on second single My Enemy, an affecting duet with Mayberry which shows a band as capable of making sophisticated mid-tempo pop as they are euphoric bangers.
Stewart went on to become the band’s de facto mentor, pushing the band, Mayberry says, “to focus on the artistic integrity of the album and everything that surrounds it”.
While recent Brit Award winner Steve Mac honed current single Miracle in London, the majority of Love Is Dead was co-produced in LA with Greg Kurstin. The double Grammy-winning producer bonded with the trio over shared music tastes and a love of recording equipment, such as the LinnDrum II, a drum machine used by the likes of Prince and Cocteau Twins in the 1980s.
“Working with Greg was so different to what we’d done before, but it also felt so comfortable and like he’d been in our band forever,” the band says. “He doesn’t try to make you write a certain kind of song. He just listens and then Jedi puppet masters the best work out of you.”
That figures: while Love Is Dead is not a departure for CHVRCHES, it’s a refinement of their knack for beautiful, brooding electro anthems.
Doherty says: “We’ve always had this super difficult side to us – artistic and introspective and angry, but then we also fully embrace commercial music. With Love Is Dead, we’ve broadened the appeal, but there are moments that are more difficult than anything we’ve ever done.”
Writing her lyrics in the same room as Doherty and Cook for the first time, Mayberry says she made a conscious effort to move away from reflections on romantic love to focus more on “the overarching concept of love”.
“I’m trying my best to toughen up for these days,” she sings on stark album track Really Gone. Now 30, the frontwoman spent much of her 20s being applauded in the live arena while enduring repellent online misogyny. Long before the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo, Mayberry bravely took a stand against the trolls in newspapers and on the TV news. She’s also used her position to criticise Donald Trump and help support a range of charities, including Women’s Aid, Amnesty International and Glasgow Rape Crisis, of which she is a patron.
“We live in a time where the death of empathy is pretty evident,” says Mayberry. “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?”
CHVRCHES visit HMV Argyle Street, Glasgow at 2pm, to sign copies of Love Is Dead
CHVRCHES play TRNSMT on July 8. Full line-up and tickets at trnsmtfest.com
Love Is Dead is released on Friday via Virgin Records
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