Love is Dead

On their third album, ‘Love Is Dead’, CHVRCHES have worked with some of the brightest minds in pop for the first time - but rather than lose themselves in the zeitgeist, they’ve never been more themselves.

Words: Ali Shutler. Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.

It felt like this random, scrappy gang of people managed to somehow trick people into actually giving us a shot,” starts Lauren Mayberry on CHVRCHES’ story so far. Since the release of ‘The Mother We Share’ in the autumn of 2012, everything around the band has been a constant whirlwind.

“It was a busy time, and we were conscious of wanting to put two albums out in reasonably quick succession. There weren’t people telling us we needed to do that; it just felt right to us. You don’t want to lose momentum.

“We were lucky with what happened to us on the first record, but if you sit around and think about the second record for too long, I think you’d get lost inside your own thoughts,” warns Lauren.

Her bandmate Martin Doherty agrees: “The longer you leave it, the more insurmountable the task of a second album seems.”

This time, they took their time in crafting new album ‘Love Is Dead’. “For us, it doesn’t feel like we’ve been gone that long because we took a few months off at the end of 2016, then we started writing at the beginning of 2017,” Lauren explains. “In our minds, it’s what do they mean we’ve been gone for two years?’”

‘Love is Dead’ is a different CHVRCHES record, but it’s the one they’ve been building towards since the group were scratching around Glasgow on their own. Labelled a political pop band from the get-go, their third album amplifies both those sides, dousing them in neon and pushing them to the front.

But there’s more to it than that: there’s friendship, celebration and a belief in one another as the band craft a kaleidoscopic landscape that offers escape but also pulls apart the real world.

“The only thing we really talked about before we went into the studio,” considers the third member of the trio, Iain Cook, “was that we wanted it to be more live sounding, moving in the direction of live drums and guitars and bass.

I’m done apologising and trying to appease people”

“Beyond that, we don’t tend to over theorise or over discuss things before we get in the room together, that tends to be an energy and a direction that takes care of itself.”

“Also it was more just the concept of taking our time with this one,” Martin adds. “I loved the frantic, intense way we worked on the first two albums, but it didn’t feel right to do this time around. To me, a third album is a defining statement, certainly in the history of the bands I like.

“To us, it was really important to just slow it down a little bit and write more songs. Right off the bat, of course, that takes more time. We easily doubled the number of songs we’ve written for any other project or any other album in the past.”

“We couldn’t have done any more exploring,” he promises. “We could have spent five years on this and still, this would have been the album I’d be happy with.”

“It feels like at this point, we’re more comfortable with each other, ourselves and the band,” adds Lauren. “This record sounds like a more distilled version of what we were trying to do on the first one, the more direct stuff is enhanced, and the weirder, more macabre stuff is enhanced as well.”

Despite the wild ride and all they’ve achieved, CHVRCHES have always looked in control. They’ve built this band from the ground up. “Even though it was moving exceptionally quickly, we were always in control of what we were trying to build and the identity we were trying to shape as writers and producers,” offers Martin.

“There was a lot going on around the band that maybe we had less control over. It was a different time. Conversations about misogyny were not mainstream topics.”

“People have never been harder to please” Martin Doherty, CHVRCHES. London, March 2018.

“So much of what we were doing at the time was reactive,” reasons Lauren. “It went from putting a song on the internet, to something quite substantially different in a few years. I do look back on that, and maybe we did seem more cool and in control of it from the outside. But then when people ask us about the conversation around #metoo and stuff like that now, I didn’t have it figured out at all at the time. You just have to ask yourself how you want to do things and what feels right, that’s always what we come back to. Let’s run through a scenario and then what feels right.”

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