CHVRCHES on new album Love Is Dead

It’s the age-old cliché: local band gets successful, moves to America and makes record with big name producer. While many have fallen into this trap and failed though, CHVRCHES were careful not to make the same mistakes as so many other bands before them.

“We didn't want to be the band that moved to America and made a record that makes no fucking sense,” says lead vocalist Lauren Mayberry of the band’s third album Love Is Dead. “From a sonic perspective, it was really important to me that it still felt like a British record, if I'm honest. I didn't want to come here and spend all my time listening to Top 40 radio and be assimilated into the American radio sound,” adds vocalist and synth player Martin Doherty.

Having previously been adamant that they would never work with outside producers, for their new album the band worked with two renowned, award-winning pop masterminds: American producer Greg Kurstin and British producer Steve Mac, who count the likes of Adele, Sia and Ed Sheeran as previous collaborators. Kurstin co-produced nine out of the album’s 13 tracks, while Mac co-wrote and co-produced Miracle, the only track to be recorded in the UK. “Looking back on it now, I think it was – the truth is – I didn't feel then like we'd had enough time to establish our identity as writers and producers… I just felt really strongly that we had to get to a point where we felt totally self-assured and totally secure in what we were doing before we ever considered it,” says Doherty. “I think if you don't know what you want to do personally or what you want to do as a band, like if we didn't know what we wanted CHVRCHES to be, I think opening that up to an outside force too early could just lead you to a really different place,” adds Mayberry.

Love Is Dead: Production, recording, and collaborating with Matt Berninger

It should come as no surprise that working with such pop heavyweights has resulted in a much bigger sounding record. Where Every Open Eye expanded upon the sound of their 2013 debut The Bones of What You Believe, Love Is Dead skyrockets to an even higher level of chart-topping, stadium-filling mega pop. The choruses on Get Out, Graves and Heaven Hell are as bold and catchy as ever, with classic CHVRCHES builds and shimmering synths, while Never Say Die and Miracle take a more anthemic, rocky turn, featuring some of the heaviest production they’ve done. And there are drops. Lots of drops.

“I think we maybe wanted it to sound more live in a lot of ways and less precise in terms of the production,” says Mayberry. "It's just taking the production in a slightly different direction but I think, if anything, that there's elements of the production on this record that are more gnarly and DIY. That's always an important balance for us; that it's always been about that juxtaposition between the more melodic, direct stuff and the darker, weirder stuff, and I think on this record it was more about just finding the space and the confidence to lean into both of those directions.” Doherty adds: “To me, that was exactly what this album was about. It was about really sharply cosigning both sides of the band, rather than trying to bring them both into a middle ground. It was to celebrate those aspects of what we do."

The album also features a collaboration with The National frontman Matt Berninger on one of the trio’s self-produced tracks, My Enemy. Having met on the festival circuit several times over the years, they got to know Berninger more closely while working on the 7-inches for Planned Parenthood project – a curated series of 7-inch records and digital downloads to benefit the non-profit – in June last year. “We started considering that song as a duet after Lauren delivered the lyrics,” says Doherty. “Partly just to do with the key of the song... and those lyrics, when we put them down, really lent themselves to a dual perspective for two points of view in the one song. He was the first name that any of us said in considering who we could ask.”

After emailing him a demo of the track, Berninger responded within half an hour saying yes, recorded his part the next day and sent it back to the band. “So, super fucking efficient,” Mayberry jokes. “He's such a storyteller in the way he writes but also in the way he sings. It was really insane to hear words that we had written being sung and reinterpreted by him, and it really brought a different energy to the song,” she concludes.

In another first, the trio wrote and recorded the vast majority of the new album in America, between New York and Los Angeles, rather than in their usual stomping ground of Alucard Studios in Glasgow. “It's important for me, as the lyric writer, to feel like you're in a different place... even if you just literally put yourself in a different physical location, I think it helps you move your head psychologically to the next step and I just didn't want to keep writing the same songs about the same things over and over again,” says Mayberry. But that’s not to say that the budget got any bigger or the standards any higher, Mayberry continues; “In the end, in New York, we ended up in a studio that's smaller than the one we had in Glasgow and it was pretty much the same set up.”

“I feel like our music is particularly tied to Glasgow in a way that it always will be,” says Doherty. “The challenge is that people, on the one hand, want you to stay completely the same but, on the other hand, they don't want you to make the same record again and again," adds Mayberry. "It has to feel connected enough to what they think the band is but it has to be furthering the conversation in some way.”

On Girls Rock Glasgow

They may be global pop stars now, but CHVRCHES certainly haven’t forgotten where they came from. The band recently helped fund Girls Rock Glasgow – a volunteer run organisation who aim to “promote girls making music, art, change, kinship and space for themselves.” The team of volunteers run a week-long summer school where girls can come together to learn instruments, form bands, make art, make merchandise and play gigs. Mayberry has long been a supporter of the project, having previously produced a podcast about it for the now defunct collective TYCI, which she founded in 2012, as well as donating instruments.

“I feel like all the problems that people talk about in the music industry, where we're at, are things that start on a grassroots level,” says Mayberry. “Whenever you talk about festival line-ups or the lack of representation of female sound engineers, tour managers, lighting engineers; if there's less women going in the first place, and then they get told that there's not a stage for them, and the attrition rate is so fucking high, then they're never going to get anywhere at the top level.

“If you don't see people at the top level... when you're 14/15, you're not even going to think it's an option for you,” she continues. “It just seemed like they were doing this really powerful, valuable thing for a community and it just sucks that they weren't getting recognised and getting the money for that, so we thought we would just try and be helpful. They're doing all the actual hard work, we're just giving them high fives.” Love Is Dead may very well be CHVRCHES' next step towards pop stardom, but while you may be able to take the band out of Glasgow, it seems you can’t take Glasgow out of the band.

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