Lauren Mayberry Reclaims the Vicious Creature

When I first meet Lauren Mayberry, her debut solo album hasn’t even been announced yet. She has shared a spate of singles under her own name, such as the pop-rock anthem “Something in the Air,” the piano ballad “Are You Awake?” and the disco-inflected “Change Shapes,” but no sign of a full-length has surfaced. In the meantime, she’s been playing some shows, such as a run opening for the Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie’s co-headlining tour, plus a handful of festival dates. I’m visiting Seattle over Labor Day weekend to cover Bumbershoot for this very magazine, and while I’m here, I spend 10 minutes backstage talking to CHVRCHES’ lead vocalist.

As I wait on a bench for the Scottish singer-songwriter to wrap up a brief photo shoot next to Kreielsheimer Promenade, her manager ushers us into McCaw Hall at Seattle Center, an event space that’s office lobby-meets- modern art gallery, its all-window exterior casting bright rays of light over the stone-gray floors. “Well, this is all quite civilized, isn’t it,” Mayberry says as we walk in, taking in the opulent, albeit sterile setting. There’s a plush-red couch all the way at the end of the foyer, and we walk past some lighting rigs and interview chairs for people who are capturing video footage (like the fellow journalist who’s scheduled to interview Mayberry after me) and take a seat on one of two stray couches that face a wide, velvet staircase leading into an auditorium. I’ve just finished watching Hurray for the Riff Raff, and Mayberry is slated to perform later that evening, around sundown. Before her set, we spend some time talking about her unannounced solo album, which I haven’t heard and don’t even know the name of.

“It was gonna be out when we booked this,” she says. But she decided the album needed some more time in the proverbial oven. “We just got the masters back the other day, so it’s all happening really fast now.” Just over three years ago, her synth-pop band CHVRCHES put out their fourth record, Screen Violence, and they set out to work on LP5 before they realized a break might be necessary. There’s currently half of a CHVRCHES album in the vault that she says fans will never hear. Instead, Mayberry has spent that off-season period working on an album of her own, and exploring her ideas and artistry on her own terms has been a gratifying, enlightening experience for her. “There was a point where I realized, ‘Maybe you’re doing things for other people’s wishes too much.’ I had all these ideas in a notebook and had lots of things I wanted to do but just didn’t make sense in a CHVRCHES universe,” she explains, “so it felt like it was a good time.”

As far as her set this evening goes, Mayberry seems visibly nervous. “It’s a lot to ask of people to come to a show of songs they’ve never heard in their lives,” she says. But she remains hopeful that this batch of new songs will connect with people. “I guess it’s all you can ever hope for when you write anything or perform anything.” Later that night, when she takes the stage in front of a sizable crowd, her energetic songs get everyone moving, especially when she does her rendition of the ever-ubiquitous “Good Luck Babe!” by Chappell Roan. Her set closer, “Sorry, Etc,” is a fitting choice, given the synth-punk stylings and incendiary instrumentals. “I sold my soul to be one of the boys,” she seethes over an aggressive drum beat and careening bassline. In a live setting, people respond well to these songs, but it won’t be until December that we get to hear them in their proper, recorded form. It all makes me, and certainly others in the audience, curious to hear what the end product sounds like.

Lauren Mayberry and I don’t reconnect again until late November, a little under a month after the formal announcement of Vicious Creature, the album she has been working on for the better part of a year. Joining me over Zoom from her home in the UK, she’s happy to discuss the album in more transparent language. “I guess everything I said then was quite cryptic anyway,” she says with a laugh. Since Bumbershoot, “Oh, Mother” and “Punch Drunk” have been tacked onto the final tracklist. Until then, the record consisted of 10 songs, and Mayberry didn’t feel like it was complete until those two tunes made the cut. There was a version of Vicious Creature from December 2023 that felt lackluster to her, so she kept chiseling away until she was truly happy with it.

“I’ve written a lot of mid songs that didn’t make the record,” she says. “I feel when you make one that’s exciting to you, you have to trust your instincts.” She needed to reconsider what her songwriting style was, independently from CHVRCHES’ process. Her partner told her that he felt like she was trying to write the way that her bandmates Iain Cook and Martin Doherty would. She had to reconfigure her brain, disengaging her conscious mind to exhume her subconscious, natural state. “It’s like if somebody was like, ‘Write this feature as if you’ve never written a feature before, as if it’s the first feature you’ve ever written,’” she explains with an apt analogy. “I was still bringing the band into the room with me, even though they weren’t there.” She needed to learn how to trust herself.

For Mayberry, it boils down to an innate, almost animalistic sense of what works and what doesn’t. She’ll watch hours upon hours of mixing master classes on YouTube, but, ultimately, she relies on her intuition. In August, when there were enough songs to compile an album, the pressure of making a Debut Solo Album was off. Instead, she could write for her own enjoyment, gravitating toward ideas that creatively fulfilled her rather than scrambling to meet an arbitrary deadline. That imposed stress is actually what leads to her weakest songs. “When we pushed the record back out, that just took the pressure off me so much,” she says. “I feel like you’ve got to write some rubbish ones to get some good ones. It’s just tidying out the brain.”

It was also a matter of finding the right collaborator for the album. She points toward co-writer and producer Dan McDougall among its key personnel. Mayberry had known him for a few years as a friend, but they had never written together. Getting him involved was, in her words, a Hail Mary, but he agreed to write some songs together, and all four of his co-writes ended up making it on Vicious Creature, “Punch Drunk” being one of them. She describes it as “a fun, twisted love song” that sits alongside some of the most personal songs she’s penned, such as “Oh, Mother.”

As a whole, though, Vicious Creature is a record of reclamation. Lyrically, Mayberry wanted to dissect social mores for women, and how those mores are often built on subjugating constrictions for what type of womanhood is deemed structurally appropriate. “As a society, we’re obsessed with the wickedness of women,” she says. “I like the idea of taking it and brandishing it in a different way. Finding a strength or an ownership over it has been helpful.” For years, she had wanted to write a song called “Crocodile Tears,” and she wanted it to feel theatrical and playful rather than dark and vengeful. Placing it within this context, the overarching motif of policing women’s behavior, seemed fitting. “I run like a rabbit when you need a distraction / You’ll be the snare for me to hang my head / You find it fun, but I don’t see the attraction / I’m sick of it now; I’m gonna kill it dead,” Mayberry sings over fluttering string synths.

By and large, Vicious Creature is autobiographical, and, frankly, the idea of people listening to it puts her on edge. “I was just like, ‘Pretend that no one is ever going to hear any of these songs, and then just write what you feel you need to write,’” she says. “So, now people are going to hear that… oh shit. Maybe I’ll be like, ‘No, it’s a concept’ and do that folklore thing. Like, girl, we know!” But making a solo LP gave her the distance from CHVRCHES that she needed at the time to write from more vulnerable, candid perspectives. She compares creativity to a ruler: “You can bend it, but if you pull it, if you push it too far, you’re going to break it, and then you can’t go back.”

When the frontperson of a popular band makes a solo album, certain questions will inevitably follow suit. What does this entail for the future of the band? Will there be more solo albums? Mayberry, for one, wants her solo endeavors and her band to co-exist. “Sometimes, there’s a sense of claustrophobia, like the walls are closing in when you feel you don’t have an outlet,” she says. “Now, I’ve figured out how to open that window and let some of the air in. I think that’s a healthy thing to do.” Once it’s time for CHVRCHES to return, she’s optimistic that everyone will come back to the project feeling rejuvenated and ready to present new ideas for where to take their music next. “I don’t want to hand in Every Open Eye Redux Mid, you know what I mean,” she says. For now, Mayberry is content to carve her own path, wherever it may lead her.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. He writes the Best New Indie column at UPROXX. His work has also appeared in Interview, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.