INTERVIEW: Lauren Mayberry releases debut solo album 'Vicious Creature': "Why would you not want to write whatever feels right for that song or that idea or that lyric?"

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 6 December, 2024

Lauren Mayberry has headed up Scottish synthpop band Chvrches since 2011. With their beguiling combination of synthpop, electropop and indie they have attracted huge critical acclaim and commercial success, in the process making Mayberry one of the most influential artists in pop music of the last decade.

Today she opens a new chapter in her career with the release of her first ever solo album Vicious Creature. First floating the idea of solo music last year around the 10th anniversary of Chvrches first album The Bones of What You Believe, Mayberry felt being in a band was holding her back from more creative paths she wanted to explore. “There’s things I’ve never been comfortable performing or sharing with a band of men, for various reasons, even if they're very nice men,” she says.

Created with fellow singer-songwriter Matthew Koma, along with Greg Kurstin and Tobias Jesso, Jr. amongst others, the album’s 12 tracks are an exhilarating ride through a mixture of synthpop and indie that remains reminiscent of yet complete removed from Chvrches’ music. Lyrically Mayberry has written about topics such as sexuality and empowerment from a deeply personal perspective in a way she has never been able to do before.

The album opens with fourth single ‘Something In The Air’, a sparkling pop-rock track which soars majestically as it breaks into the chorus. Lyrically it has a political lean as it speaks about conspiracy theories and how overwhelming a world consumed by misinformation can be. ‘You come up with your stories / Conspiracy theories / Of why we're all here / Oh, I just want to be someone who's happy.’

‘Shame’ is an album standout with its eclectic soundscapes that moves from disjointed electronica into a stripped back, acoustic, almost fairytale-sweet chorus. It explores the notion of how women are often made to feel shame when it comes to relationships and sexuality: ‘Wash your mouth out / Speak only when spoken to / Pure devotion / Make sure that it doesn't bruise.’ “I had the idea for a while of a song that had the tagline of ‘what a shame’, but in a sarcastic way,” Mayberry says of the song. “And the word ‘shame’ having a double meaning - the shame you feel and internalise, but what a shame you feel like that and can't change it.”

‘Anywhere But Dancing’ dials the tone down, with a gorgeous guitar-country sound, and a melancholic story of a relationship that has died. ‘I stared into the mirror / To find the face you used to wear / But it isn’t there / And now he takes you anywhere but dancing’.

‘Punch Drunk’ brings in spoken word set to a foundation of punk mixed with New Wave and electronica, while ‘Sorry Etc.’ follows a similar sonic route with a harder sound that brings back the punk feel with a hardcore electronic-synth sound reminiscent of the early 1980s post-punk era.

Another contender for album highlight, ‘Mantra’ is a gloriously moody and dreamy track with swirling beats, distorted vocals and a primal synth beat. Its lyrics contrast with the slinky, shimmering music as Mayberry sings of the power imbalance in society and how it disadvantages women. ‘You can keep your body / I just want your place in the world…I will seek you only to destroy you / With a voice that never could quite demand respect.’

Latest single ‘Sunday Best’ is an uplifting pop track with dashes of indie and rock that is a demand to always remain true to who you are, and to never compromise.. ‘The kind of sex that requires sadness / Is not a way to spend your time / Don’t walk on eggshells if you’re not the shy retiring kind’

The album ends with the beautiful ballad and first single ‘Are You Awake?’ which features little more than a piano and Mayberry’s vocal in perhaps its finest form on the entire album. Strings are introduced towards the end of the song as Mayberry’s voice becomes less prominent in the mix before it ends with a brief sparkle of synths. With lyrics that speak of loneliness and homesickness and starting again, it is a beautiful nod to this new chapter in her life as a solo artist outside the ‘home’ of Chvrches, with that little throwback at the very end to the synthpop that previously encompassed her career.

There are artists who are defined by their band or the people they create with and there are artists who thrive in any environment due to their innate musical genius. Mayberry definitely falls into the latter and Vicious Creature is clear proof of what a truly exciting artist she is. Diverse, intoxicating, thought provoking and an album to really immerse yourself in. We recently caught up with Mayberry to chat all about the creation of the album and this next era in her musical career.

Hi Lauren, so lovely to see you, and congratulations on Vicious Creature, because it is an album of all kinds of beauty and sly comedy and laughs and reflection and rage. It's really, really something.
Thank you very much, that's very nice.

It's really beautiful. What does the name Vicious Creature mean to you and where did it come from?
The title comes from a lyric which is ‘nostalgia is such a vicious creature / Another way to say that you fear the future’ and I think a lot of the songs on the record are about sifting through the past and figuring out what you want to hold on to and what you want to let go of. But I also liked the idea that when you take those two words out and you put them underneath a picture of my face, what does that say? So much of my career has been about coming to terms with how people view me, externally, but also even within a project. Sometimes when disputes come up within the workplace, I'm often baffled, or I'm like, ‘Wow, you really think that I am a vindictive, manipulative cunt!’ And I don't think that that's who I am. I'm like, what, why? I'm just in my house, watching Bad Sisters and talking to my cat! I think there's a lot of projection that's done with a fear of women, or a need for control or understanding of women, and the obsessiveness about the goodness and badness or the wickedness of women who don't meet the criteria you think they should. So I liked the drama of it. I was inspired by Gwen Stefani, and Diva by Annie Lennox, I loved the way that she owned the character of a diva.

We're gonna lean into the aggression, I love that! You’ve spoken about how you had I guess you could call it an epiphany on physicality, because a woman's goodliness or sexiness, or even her opinion, will always be weaponised against her, you have come to embrace your physicality on stage recently as well.
One of the things I thought about with the stage and the visuals for the record was trying to stitch back together certain parts of my life. I was so young when Chvrches started, I was 23 and we went from zero to 100 pretty quickly. I didn't have any idea about being a performer in that space, definitely not to the degree that it was happening, and there's weird parts of my life where I did feel quite consumed, I felt really disconnected from my body because people would just talk about it all the time. They would talk about my body in a way that they didn't dissect the men in the band, and it felt quite disturbing to me a lot of the time. I said to a therapist once ‘I feel like I live in my head, and this is just like a car that I drive around’ and she said ‘maybe that's not that healthy’. So for me this record is writing about a lot of different things about girlhood and womanhood, and it's not lost on me that the last Chvrches album we made, I was like ‘it’s kind of like a body horror concept album with sad undertones’! I think I was almost like ‘there's something that you should probably fix here, as a woman trying to live inside your own head, inside your own body, I think it would be good to be more connected’.

I have a friend who is an amazing dancer, choreographer, and we've talked about these things over wine nights many times and we talked about how your body is for performance, your body is for show, it is yours, but it's not yours. It’s just so odd. So when it came to starting to think about the movement for the shows, she was really instrumental in helping bring that out of me, because I would have just stayed standing all hunched and confused otherwise!

Do you feel the same way about your voice?
This process has been really nice for me, because I get to be completely in charge of what a vocal melody is, how the vocal is produced, what I'm saying and how I'm saying it. In Chvrches, we’ll write a melody together, or it will come from an idea the guys have had with the demo they brought in, so I'm not necessarily the sole person in charge of most of those melodies. I remember having to go get vocal lessons into the first Chvrches album because the melodies were really not in a place I would naturally sing. I've learned to be good in that kind of mixed voice, middle register, in a way that didn't feel comfortable to me before. That's what's great about the band, we all had such different interests and such different lives before this band, but a lot of the time, particularly at the beginning, I felt like Chvrches was their band, and I just joined it. So this was a nice exercise for me to sing higher parts or lower parts, and not everything needs to be forte all the time. You can use falsetto, you can do spoken word, you can do loads of different things. Your voice can be an instrument in any way you want it to be. That's something I always think about when I listen to you Eurythmics or Annie Lennox, the way she uses her voice is so interesting to me because she uses it as an instrument. There's all these kind of Baroque backing vocals, and she plays herself like a violin or like a synthesiser and that was fun for me to do, because that's the first thing I think of when writing. I'll sing terrible voice memos into my phone and sing the instruments and the bass, I can hear the instruments in my head before I use real instruments.

I have to say, ‘Anywhere But Dancing’, this song is like bedroom floor music, headphones walking music. It's definitely a girl alone song, which I just think is so stunning. You’ve spoken about wanted to lean into that more, and even though the men in Chvrches were lovely, you felt like there were certain things you couldn't say. Is this why this album has a real kid in a candy shop feel to it because you just got to do all these things you’ve been holding back on, you’ve just purged and put into Vicious Creature?
I think so, yeah. There was a moment where I was like, is this too many different things to feel coherent on one record? But then I zoomed out a little and I was like, no, that's why this record should be like that. Maybe the second record will be something more specific or conceptual, but why would you not want to write whatever feels right for that song or that idea, or that lyric? It does feel kind of a like a blood letting in a good way.

You've always been such a figure in the music industry for speaking out against aggressions toward women, the dismissal of women in the industry, online trolling. How have you found carrying that mantle of the hero, and now with this album, Vicious Creature., and the subject matters you're addressing, is it just like, go big or go home?
Thank you, that's very nice of you to say. I don't know. When I was 24 and we were doing the first Chvrches album, it didn't feel like it was a controversial thing to talk about. I was conscious that there were other peers who would behind the scenes say that they agreed, but they weren't necessarily talking about that as part of their work. I feel like it was always something that was brought to me. The sexism that was around the band was always pretty evident, it wasn't necessarily me starting those conversations a lot of the time. It was odd to me that you were supposed to just take it all the time. I look back at things that were written about us in 2013 I'm like, you couldn't write that now. If you wrote that in that way, or you put that headline on it, or you asked that question in a radio interview, you would get your arse handed to you. It is odd that most of the time, I would just make a joke about it, to put focus on it and then deflect to the next thing. I don't know of any female friends, queer friends, artists of colour that want the first thing that's spoken about in relation to their art is something that is intrinsic in your life experience. It’s how you write and probably what you write about, but it's not the first thing you want as the tagline next to your name all the time. I've come to terms with the fact that probably for the entirety of my career, I will be a “female artist’, and then I will be a “feminist artist’, and I'm fine with that at this point. But I’ve always felt that if we're going to have this conversation, let's redirect it to something that feels positive, and with the last Chvrches album, and Vicious Creature, at least you can point people back to the art. ou can bring it back to the work, rather than just have it be this abstract conversation around ‘So sexism, bad?’

Lastly, I'm sure they were all satisfying in their own way, but what was the most lip smacking, satisfying track to write and finish on Vicious Creature?
I would say ‘Oh Mother’, because I'm very proud of that song. I don't think I would have written that song at any other point in my life or with any other person. It was the last thing we wrote for the record, and it was just on the last afternoon that Dan McDougall, who made the song with me, and I were hanging out. We'd finished everything we were supposed to be doing, and we're like, ‘I wonder if there's anything else?’ He just started playing this piano part, and then we wrote it in one afternoon. I feel like that's really nice. You make a conscious plan of what you want to make, here's my concept, and here's my mood board, but sometimes songs just happen when they're supposed to happen. It wasn't even like we mined for that particularly deeply, it just kind of revealed itself. So that song feels accidentally very satisfying.

And ‘Sunday Best’ is a song I'm very proud of, which I wrote with Greg Kurstin, who we made a lot of the third Chvrches record with. He is a great person and an amazing writer, but this was such a different proposition. I remember really working on that bridge for ages. Greg is an incredible producer in all senses of the word, he knows when to just let you sweat it out. And he was just ‘I’m going to leave this on a loop, and I'm going to go make some coffee.’ He would visit the room every half an hour to be like, ‘do you need me?’Having someone who knows to give that space is something that not a lot of writers have. People get quite stressed, or they get stressy at you, and you never write anything good when someone's breathing down your neck. That's just years of experience and being a very intuitive creator, knowing to give people the space, because I knew that that bridge, those lyrics needed to be right. It can't be trite, but it needs to be a really emotional gut punch. But I didn't know how to land it, and I think I just sat and rocked back and forward with my head in my hands for like, an hour and a half! And then when I had it, it felt really good to complete the puzzle.

Congratulations on Vicious Creature Lauren and enjoy all of it. So thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you! I appreciate you making the time.

Vicious Creature is out now via Mushroom Music. You can buy and stream here.
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Read out six page interview with Lauren Mayberry in issue 11 of Women In Pop magazine