Screen Violence

In late 2019, CHVRCHES frontwoman Lauren Mayberry found an old document of names the Glasgow three-piece had once considered for their band. “I saw ‘Screen Violence’ and thought there could be something in it,” she tells Apple Music. “It had multiple meanings to us at that time.” It wasn’t just that it encapsulated a horror movie aesthetic the trio have always been drawn to. It was also that Mayberry had, at that point, been experiencing her own version of “screen violence”. While touring the band’s 2018 album Love Is Dead, she was facing near-constant death threats from strangers online, leading her to weigh up the pros and cons of even being in the band. “Everyone’s like, ‘Don’t listen to the haters.’ But there’s a difference between not listening and being worried that someone’s going to murder you,” she says. “Coming up with that title and the concept felt quite cathartic and reassuring.” But when the global pandemic took hold, its title took on an even greater resonance as everything shifted onto screens—including the creation of the record, mostly worked on in 2020 over video sessions between LA (where Mayberry, along with bandmate and multi-instrumentalist Martin Doherty, are based) and Glasgow (home to CHVRCHES’ third member, Iain Cook). And so, alongside fear, confusion and misogyny, there are also explorations of isolation and homesickness, all set against a tight electro-pop palette that’s by turns anxious (“Violent Delights”, “Nightmares”), dreamy (“California”) and wistful (outro “Better If You Don’t”, a love letter to Glasgow). And despite the heavy subject matter that fuelled this album, CHVRCHES have rarely felt—or sounded—better. “Sometimes you can hear that a band phoned it in and that their hearts weren’t in it some way,” says Doherty. “I feel like every inch of ourselves went into this record. It wasn’t always an easy thing to make, for obvious reasons, and at times we had to push ourselves to the edge to make it. When this band is going well, t