On CHVRCHES’ latest album, Screen Violence, the songwriting is direct, unambiguous, and personal—making it some of their best work yet. The Scottish trio of multi-instrumentalists Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cooke, and Martin Doherty employ the language of cinema, slasher films in particular, as a device to unlock the storytelling, with synthesizers favored by the genre’s auteurs to augment that reality in their musical soundscapes. This suited the darker musical space that the band had found themselves in after an attempt at a more pop process with their previous effort, 2018’s Love Is Dead. Endless song cycles of enduring the hate and violence of internet trolls also peaked and took its toll on Mayberry in the spring of 2019, and meant she found refuge in the confines of this made-up world of the slasher film. No matter how bad the violence, it was on celluloid, and not in real life where she was receiving death threats.
Writing the music through the lens of a horror film, for her was less about artifice and more artistry. “There was this kind of cinematic layer to it and I think it made it easier for me to feel comfortable being more truthful,” says Mayberry, speaking from inside a Zoom screen, at her Los Angeles home. “There was a lot of bullshit that was happening around the band,” she says of that spring when CHVRCHES issued a statement against working with “predators and abusers” after Marshmello, one of their
