Lauren Mayberry: “I needed to prove to myself that I actually had value”

Embracing chaos, heartbreak, and her Glaswegian grit, Lauren Mayberry unveils ‘Vicious Creature’, a defiant debut that fuses biting pop with introspective storytelling. As she steps out from CHVRCHES, she reveals the struggles, the triumphs, and the unfiltered honesty that fuelled her most personal project yet.

Words: Ali Shutler.
Photos: Jennifer McCord.

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“I really did think I’d fucked this,” says Lauren Mayberry. Last year, she teased her “fun, freaky, sad, weird, joyful” solo album before dropping the piano-driven single ‘Are You Awake?’ to draw a defiant line between her day job in synth-pop-rockers CHVRCHES and this new project. The giddy, biting ‘Shame’ followed, alongside a string of theatrical, pop-infused live shows.

It was all leading to a full-length that was pencilled in for release before 2023 was done, but then things started to unravel behind the scenes. Producer Matt Koma had a schedule change and couldn’t finish what the pair had started, while a reshuffle at Universal Music was swiftly followed by a licensing disagreement with TikTok, which temporarily caused all the label’s music to be removed from the platform, delaying things even further.

“We could have released a version of the album at the end of last year,” admits Lauren. Of course, it didn’t feel right for her solo career to start with an album that was simply fine. “It just felt like a bad way to finish it. If I’ve learned anything from the last ten years of being in CHVRCHES, it’s that you have to be able to fully own whatever you put out.”

So she kept creating, not knowing how or when the album would get finished. “I would get so disheartened about it because we’d already started releasing music, and I definitely would not have done that if I’d have known I was going to end up in the dinghy by myself,” she says. “The thing is, you can’t expect anybody else to care about your music as much as you care about it. I had some dark nights, but ultimately, I knew I had to just figure it out.”

All that sadness, frustration and uncertainty meant she was putting more and more pressure on the writing sessions, which often led to songs that, according to Lauren, “fucking stunk”. And so, backstage at The Great Escape in May, Lauren told herself that she’d fucked her solo career before it even got going and considered sacking it all off to return home. “I’m a bit of a cunt, though, and I don’t want other people to decide for me,” she says today. “Even though I was disappointed and felt quite let down, I knew it would be really shit if that’s how it all ended. Maybe it’s the Glaswegian in me, but it was good fuel for the fire.” A few days later, she went into the studio with Dan McDougall, wrote four new songs, and the album was done.

“I had some dark nights, but ultimately, I knew I had to just figure it out”

The result is ‘Vicious Creature’, a cathartic, liberated, euphoric album that doesn’t shy away from vengeance, loss, regret or pain. “It was definitely a fucking journey, but we made it.”

Lauren first started thinking about a solo project in 2018, shortly after the release of CHVRCHES’ third album ‘Love Is Dead’. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I was just very conscious that bands don’t last forever,” admits Lauren, that fear fuelled by the mixed reviews that ‘Love Is Dead’ received after near-universal praise for both ‘The Bones Of What You Believe’ and ‘Every Open Eye’. The subtle but undeniable discontent that was growing inside the camp didn’t help either. “I’ve been in bands since I was 15, and I’ve always been incredibly ride-or-die,” says Lauren. It dawned on her that CHVRCHES wasn’t the same as being in a band with mates from university because the stakes were so incredibly different.

“I never want to half-ass anything with CHVRCHES, but I also realised I had no other creative outlet, which perhaps isn’t as healthy as I thought it was,” she offers, with bandmates Iain Cook and Martin Doherty co-writing and producing for other artists. “Also, if you’ve only got one place where you put everything, there’s a lot of pressure on that, especially as people grow and change.”

“I was just very conscious that bands don’t last forever”

She started pulling together ideas for a solo record, but during the pandemic, CHVRCHES came together virtually to create fourth album ‘Screen Violence’, which acted as overdue “marriage therapy” for the group. Still, after encouragement from friends that there was something in the solo tracks she’d already been toying around with, she decided to see it through. “It was liberating and intimidating in equal measure, especially at the start,” she explains.

While CHVRCHES are a democracy that acts as both a sounding board and a safety net, Lauren suddenly found herself in charge of every decision. “There were definitely some songs that other people really liked for the project, but I knew couldn’t happen. If you think it’s shit, you have to stick to your guns and say it’s shit.”

“It feels weird to say this, but making this album was a coming-of-age of sorts,” says Lauren, who joined CHVRCHES as a 24-year-old who had never fronted a band before. On the other hand, her bandmates had already established themselves as working musicians, so there was a pre-existing structure for how everything worked. “I spent a lot of early CHVRCHES feeling quite inadequate. It’s been good for me to figure this all out for myself and learn to trust my own opinions. I haven’t needed to think about how to sell an idea; I can just do it.” It’s here where the freedom of ‘Vicious Creature’ comes from.

“If you think it’s shit, you have to stick to your guns and say it’s shit”

There are threads between CHVRCHES and Lauren Mayberry’s solo project, but it is a deliberately different world, with ‘Vicious Creature’ pulling together her love of emo, pop, theatre, and storytelling. The worst writing sessions were when someone sat down with her and tried to make half-baked versions of what CHVRCHES do. “What’s the point? It’s just disrespectful to the rest of the band.”

“I did want to step away from the 80s stuff, even though it’s an era that’s been very good to me,” she explains. “Personally, I don’t even think the next CHVRCHES album should be the 80s synth-pop thing because we’ve done that enough times now. We’ve perfected the recipe, and I think it’s time for something different.”

Instead, Lauren set out to make a “really dark, theatrical pop record” after repeated watches of Joe Masteroff’s Cabaret – a musical that follows the rise of the Nazis against the backdrop of a hedonistic nightclub – and pulling inspiration from PJ Harvey, Annie Lennox’s ‘Diva’, and 90s-00s pop groups like All Saints and Sugababes.

But there are also “less theatrical, more confessional” songs that channel singer-songwriters like Alanis Morrissette, Fiona Apple, Elliott Smith, Sinéad O’Connor, and Tori Amos. “I didn’t necessarily think that was ever going to happen, but stuff was happening in my life that came through in the writing.”

The second-to-last song written for the album was ‘Something In The Air’, a “fun, 90s-sounding Britpop banger.” The last was ‘Oh Mother’, which is “probably one of the saddest songs I’ve ever written,” says Lauren. “One day, Dan and I were giggling and jumping around the studio; the next, we’re both having a small cry by the piano.” It was at that point she knew the record was done.

“Sometimes you listen to a record, and you can tell the artist only wrote ten songs, and they’re the ones that made it. I just wanted to know that I turned over enough rocks to be choosing things for the right reasons,” she offers, having written over 40 potential songs for the album.

It means that fan-favourite tracks from those early live shows, like ‘Bird’ and ‘Under The Knife’, have been cut. “I felt a bit sad about it as it was happening, but it’s better for the record. You don’t need too much of one thing,” she says. “‘Vicious Creature’ is half big, slappy pop, half acoustic singer-songwriter. We’re allowed acoustic guitars in the solo era, but we also keep the 808s.”

“Making this album was a coming-of-age of sorts”

Lyrically, as well, Lauren Mayberry’s album covers some serious ground. “There was a lot of stuff I was clearing out of my proverbial closet initially,” she says. With many of the songs written in the same window as the ten-year anniversary celebrations for CHVRCHES’ debut album, she couldn’t help but reflect on that time in her life and what came next.

“A lot of amazing things happened, but there was also a lot of stuff that was really quite bad,” she says, having previously described the hate and abuse she received in a 2013 Guardian article titled ‘I will not accept online misogyny’. It started a conversation, with Lauren asked about it in almost every interview that followed, but it also encouraged more vile, sexist comments because how dare a woman use her voice. “I was trying to brush it off and say it didn’t impact me, but it definitely fucked my brain up,” she admits.

“I’m very glad people associate the band with certain politics, and I think I’m happy to have been vocally feminist at a time when I don’t know that a lot of other people in the pop sphere were doing that,” she continues. “But I don’t go around thinking about my femaleness necessarily. I think about it when I’m confronted by the world with it. I would rather write from what feels like a very female point of view, but about different things.”

“‘Vicious Creature’ is half big, slappy pop, half acoustic singer-songwriter”

There’s the dreamy ‘Mantra’, a “witchy, almost-séance-like song” that’s less about wanting to date indie boys in bands and more about wanting to take their jobs, while the twisting banger ‘Punch Drunk’ is a love song, with a suitably Mayberry twist. “It’s not as fun if it’s just a blatant love song, so I wrote about meeting somebody that’s really, really nice to you, and it makes you act fucking crazy.”

Then there’s the glittering bite of ‘Crocodile Tears’, written about a phone call where Lauren was too busy trying to fix things to say what she wanted. “I wish I’d been able to say, ‘Shut the fuck up and stop piling all this crap on me’, but that’s not who I am. Luckily, that song allows me to be a more theatrical character who can say the things I wouldn’t.”

“I wanted to focus on making things feel celebratory across ‘Vicious Creature’,” says Lauren. “I’ve had a lot of experiences that have been really amazing, but there wasn’t a lot of joy around. I was worried that one day, all this is going to disappear, and my only memories would be quite dark, so I set about trying to inject more joy into my day-to-day existence. And apparently, some of that is via slightly vindictive, theatrical pop songs.”

“Luckily, I also wrote a lot of sad stuff about real life as well,” says Lauren with a smirk. ‘Sunday Best’ was meant to be a cheery song, inspired by Talking Heads and Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’, but “stuff happened that made me feel like how I’ve spent a lot of my life is actually bullshit, and I’ve missed so much time that I’ll never get back,” says Lauren. So she started thinking about all the things she’d do differently, including not wasting her own time worrying about things that really don’t matter. “I wanted to write a hopeful song that would act as a clean slate,” says Lauren. Her manager told her how uplifting it all sounded. “Yeah, but ‘Sunday Best’ is about funerals, isn’t it?” replied Lauren, who reunited with ‘Love Is Dead’ producer Greg Kurstin for the track. “Again, I thought I was going to make a big pop banger, and I ended up with an existential crisis worrying about the death of your parents.”

“I liked the drama of my debut album being called ‘Lauren Mayberry – Vicious Creature’,” she says, with the title lifted from the lush, piano-driven ‘A Work Of Fiction’ and the lyric “nostalgia is such a vicious creature, another way to say you fear the future”.

“The wickedness of women is something that’s been levelled at me a lot over the course of my career,” Lauren continues, having had to deny plans to quit the band to go solo since before CHVRCHES even released their second album. “So I may as well put it on a t-shirt.”

“I set about trying to inject more joy into my day-to-day existence”

Even now, she reassures us that a solo album doesn’t mean the band is done. “I feel like so much of my existence has been proving that I’m loyal, proving that I’m good, and proving that I’m not going to let people down. It’s been a lot of work on the old noggin,” she says. Six months after releasing ‘Are You Awake?’, Lauren was still worrying about how her solo career was going to make other people feel. “Maybe it’s because women are taught to handle everybody’s emotions, but I had to stop. The toothpaste is already out of the tube at this point,” she offers. “I like to think I’ve earned trust and respect at this point, and if I haven’t, then I’m never going to get it.”

It ties into the blistering summer of pop, which has helped to further break down any preconceptions of what “female pop” can be. “There’s just so many interesting storytellers, and it all sounds completely different,” says Lauren, name-checking Charli xcx, SZA, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan. “It’s nice that the stuff that seems to be resonating most does feel really idiosyncratic, very personal, and it doesn’t feel like it was cooked in a pop lab.”

“It’s exciting that Charli is writing songs like ‘Girl, So Confusing’,” she continues. “It’s a concept I understand because I’ve had those experiences, but the general public and the media being able to handle a woman saying something that, on the face of it, isn’t very nice, with nuance feels new to me. She doesn’t owe you niceness; she owes herself honesty.”

Lauren also found it “hopeful” seeing beabadoobee celebrated for shutting down a yelled marriage proposal during a recent gig. A clip of Lauren doing something similar was shared in 2015, inspiring think-pieces about how unkind she’d been and forcing her to explain herself over and over. “Sometimes I think nothing has changed at all, but then I see stuff like that, and it feels heartening.”

“The toothpaste is already out of the tube at this point”

Ultimately, ‘Vicious Creature’ is an album of perseverance. “I think I just wanted to prove to myself that it could be done,” says Lauren. “Ideally, you work with other people because you want to, not because you ‘need’ to, and I needed to prove to myself that I actually had value. I know that sounds like a sad thing to say, but I didn’t want this album to feel sad. I wanted it to feel celebratory.”

She goes on to say how terrible she thinks being an actor would be because you can only do what you love with other people. “I guess they can do monologues in the mirror, but it’s not really the same, is it?” Perhaps that’s why so many turn to music. “I just wanted to future-proof my own creativity,” says Lauren. “I started making music because it made me happy. It’s been weird to realise that I needed to give myself permission to make things just because I want to make them.”

With ‘Vicious Creature’ finally done, Lauren feels like she could make another album right now, but she can’t. “It’s not what we agreed,” she says. There will probably be more at some point in the future, though. “It tickles a different part of my brain.”

“I have no idea about what’s going to happen next or how people are going to respond to these songs,” she explains, wanting both the music and the live shows to feel like a release for all involved. “This was never about matching or replacing CHVRCHES, though. It’s not an escape hatch, but it does feel like I’ve opened a window, and I can get a bit of oxygen in here,” Lauren says. “It’s been a very positive thing for my existence.”

Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. Lauren Mayberry’s debut solo album ‘Vicious Creature’ is out soon.