‘I twisted myself into a pretzel to please people’

Lauren Mayberry is a peacemaker.

Since 2011, she’s been frontwoman of the Glaswegian band Chvrches, topping festival bills and the album charts with a trademark barrage of distorted synths and razor-sharp melodies.

Mayberry was the baby of the band – just 23 when she joined, and years younger than her bandmates, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty.

But their chemistry was instant. Chvrches’ debut single, The Mother We Share, was written and recorded in 48 hours, using the only three synths they owned – but it became a word of mouth hit, earning them airplay on BBC Radio 1 and support slots with Passion Pit and Depeche Mode.

In the press, they carefully presented themselves as a band, with each member receiving equal billing. But Mayberry says she worried about being the junior partner.

“I was always conscious that I was younger than the other guys, and they had a lot more experience,” she says.

“They’d been to music school, and I hadn’t. So I always felt like I was on the back foot, in terms of where I sat in the hierarchy.”

That feeling was amplified during a 2019 tour of Australia.

The itinerary gave the band a four-day break in Melbourne, and Mayberry was looking forward to spending the downtime with her bandmates and the crew – until she discovered they’d made separate plans and she was stranded in her hotel room.

“I remember being very upset and hurt by that because I was always worrying about everyone else and taking care of everybody, and it was a humbling moment,” she says.

“In the end, I hired a little car and drove to an Australian spa town and had a wee cry listening to Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer.”

Looking back, she thinks that being the only woman in the touring party left her carrying the “emotional labour” of keeping the show on the road.

“I feel like I twisted myself into a pretzel sometimes to make everyone happy.

“Then I’d look back and think, ‘And were you happy?’

“Not really, but I was keeping the peace.”

She considered leaving the band after that Australian incident. Then Covid struck, and Chvrches ended up making a fourth album, 2021’s Screen Violence, remotely.

She finally took the plunge a year later, but not before signing a new record deal with her bandmates, assuring the future of the project.

“I was conscious it would give people a sense of security, that I’d made a commitment,” she says.

“I don’t know that that’s how it actually works, but that was my hope.”

She’s keen to stress there’s no bad blood: Martin and Doherty have given her their full support. Still, it’s natural for someone leaving a band to define themselves in opposition to that music – otherwise what’s the point?

As Mayberry succinctly puts it: “I didn’t want to make a crap knock-off Chvrches record.”

In recording sessions, she’d flinch when anyone pulled out a vintage synth. Instead, she pursued a more organic, lyrics-first approach.

But after a decade in a trio, the instinct to compromise was hard-wired.

“I’m very used to arguing my point, then trying to see other people’s point of view,” she says.

“So it was a real learning curve to be like, ‘No, this is my opinion, and if I don’t think it’s right, then it’s not right, and that’s the end of the conversation’.”

The result is Vicious Creature, an album that showcases new depths to Mayberry‘s voice, which fluctuates between vulnerability and venom, while paying homage to her pop heroines.

She channels the spirit of All Saints on the album opener Something In The Air; and borrows the choppy, sampled strings of Annie Lennox’s Walking On Broken Glass to power the single Crocodile Tears.

The latter is a furious riposte to an emotionally manipulative man, where Mayberry snarls: “What a man will say just to get his way / Always crying wolf, so I’m sad to say / I don’t really wanna hear it from you, babe“.

The singer says she’s role-playing in that song, inspired by the dark, subversive femininity of Velma Kelly in the musical Chicago, or Cabaret’s Sally Bowles.

It’s one of several songs that survived the first incarnation of the album – tentatively titled Fiction – that would be “dark, theatrical and character driven”.

Slowly, over time, more personal songs started to creep into the mix.

The syncopated pulse of Change Shapes is a condemnation of music industry sexism (“I’m a doll inside a box, with a ball and a chain”). Sorry, Etc tells a similar story over a chaotic hybrid of garage rock and drum & bass.

“There were definitely a few songs where it was at best expressing frustrations and at worst [feeling] kind of hurt,” about her life in music, Mayberry says.

The album’s most intimate moment is a muted piano ballad called Oh, Mother.

Over three verses, Mayberry documents the shifting relationship with her mother – from the unquestioning love of childhood to adolescent disgust and, finally, the realisation that their time together is limited.

“It kills me to know you won’t be around,” she sings gently. “Oh mother, what will I do without you?“

The last song written for the record, the words poured out after Mayberry’s friend and co-writer Dan McDougall sketched out the chords in the studio.

Discussing the lyrics, which were inspired by a family illness, the singer becomes a little emotional.

“When you’re living in the shadow of things like that, it’s on your mind all the time,” she says.

“I think about it all the time. When I go away on tour, I always think, ‘Oh, is this the tour where I’m gone and I miss it’.

“So that last afternoon in the studio was quite a weepy one… But then we went to Nando’s. So it’s all about balance.”

Oh, Mother is the sort of song she could never have written in Chvrches, Mayberry says.

“It’s not a place that we would go emotionally or sonically,” she says.

“I think the best songs happen when the lyrics and the meaning and the sonics interlink but [with Chvrches] I was writing things in my notebooks and thinking, ‘This is never going to fit with what the band have built’.”

Change is never easy, though. While some reviews have called the album a “masterclass in pop alchemy“, others have said Mayberry “still sounds like someone finding their feet“.

Fans of Chvrches’ industrial sound have expressed disappointment too, but the singer has learned to distance herself from criticism.

“When people are like, ‘Screw you’, I rationalise it like this: You’re mad at me, but you’re mad at me because life is hard, and our music made your life a bit easier for a minute. And now you’re like, ‘Please don’t take that away.’

“When I was 24, that was overwhelming, but it made sense once I could compartmentalise it.

“You are the representative of something that means so much to this person – so when you do something else, it threatens the idea of that existing.”

The flipside of that equation comes in concert. When Mayberry plays a song like Asking For A Friend, with its reassuring mantra, “you still matter“, she often sees “someone in the audience having a wee dance-cry”.

“And when people cry, I cry. Everyone’s like, ‘Are you ok?’ but I’m just caught up in the moment.

“But I hope that’s why I’m good at my job, because I have some kind of empathy.

“It’s inconvenient for my life, but hopefully good for the crowd.”