Lauren Mayberry was in the bunk of her band’s tour bus in the winter of 2021, rolling between Denver and Boulder, Colo., when she started wondering how old Gwen Stefani was when she released her first solo record.
“I had an overly romantic notion of being in a band, this kind of ‘Goonies’ mentality,” Mayberry said, referring to her role since 2011 as frontwoman for the Glaswegian synth-pop trio Chvrches. “I was very conscious of not wanting to be perceived as disloyal.”
Despite her hesitation to step out on her own, “If the only reason you’re not doing something is because of how it might make other people feel,” she continued, “you’re going to people-please yourself to death.”
In the end, she took the plunge: Mayberry’s solo debut, “Vicious Creature,” due Dec. 6, is a fresh start that allows the singer and songwriter, 37, to approach her career from a different aesthetic and more empowering angle. Mayberry was only 23 when she joined Chvrches, years younger than her bandmates, the multi-instrumentalists Iain Cook and Martin Doherty. Over four albums, Cook and Doherty supplied a dizzying architecture of synth soundscapes that she filled with broody lyrics and her clarion vocals. The band inspired word-of-mouth buzz from the beginning — a little more than a year after anonymously releasing their first song, Chvrches were opening for Depeche Mode. But Mayberry worried her purpose was at times decorative.
“I remember feeling really out of my depth and lonely,” she said.
Seated at her kitchen table in the cozy Los Angeles bungalow she shares with her musician boyfriend, Sam Stewart (son of the Eurythmics co-founder Dave), Mayberry quickly moved a scented candle before it burned the tail of their cat, Cactus. She admitted she would invoke the production term “quantizing” during early interviews without knowing its meaning, and flashed a droll smile when asked what distinguishes her solo songs from the Chvrches catalog. “Less synths,” she replied.
“Vicious Creature” navigates an array of influences including punk, Britpop and piano-driven ballads. Mayberry’s recent single “Crocodile Tears” features an aerobic beat reminiscent of ’80s dance anthems. “What a man will say just to get his way / Always crying wolf so I’m sad to say / I don’t really wanna hear it from you, babe,” she sings, a kiss-off to toxic boyfriends. “I don’t want it to be vengeful,” she said. “I want it to feel freeing.” So during live performances, she punctuates the chorus with pelvic thrusts and theatrical baying, laughing that her Chvrches bandmates probably would not want “wolf howls and choreography.”
Mayberry teamed up with various producers and songwriters, including Dan McDougall (Ellie Goulding, Liam Gallagher), Ethan Gruska (Phoebe Bridgers) and, after some hesitation, her boyfriend, Stewart, who has worked with Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan. (“My manager said it’s like having a Ferrari in your house and not driving it,” she said.)
Some songs arrived by accident, like the album’s undulant, All Saints-channeling opener, “Something in the Air,” about a famous Britpop frontman with a penchant for conspiracy theories whom Mayberry and McDougall met in a London studio while she was struggling with writer’s block. “He thought he was in a safe space,” she said, and thus declined to name him.
Several of the 12 tracks put a sizable target on the male ego. The buoyant, puckish single “Change Shapes” expresses fatigue with always accommodating other people, while “Sorry, Etc” is a hyper, drum-and-bass driven screed about the sacrifices required to be “one of the boys.” “Don’t cry, we’re just getting to the good part,” Mayberry taunts in the chorus. “What happened? You were being such a good sport.”
Growing up in Glasgow, Mayberry studied piano and drums, and played in bands. She was inspired by artists like Annie Lennox and Sleater-Kinney, but in school she embraced music that she thought her male bandmates were more likely to approve of, especially after being mocked by a boyfriend for buying an Avril Lavigne CD.
“I was kind of studying their universe so that I could learn it well enough and be allowed in,” Mayberry said. “I’m going to know more about Fugazi B-sides, but when I get home I’m going to listen to ‘Under the Pink,’” she added, referring to the Tori Amos album.
The stigma of standing out followed her to Chvrches. Over the years, she said, she repeatedly declined requests to step apart from Cook and Doherty, whether for magazine profiles or songwriting opportunities. At the same time, she was singled out for harassment and online threats to the point where she wrote a Guardian column about her experience. “I’ve definitely white-knuckled through some things that were not cool,” she said.
In early 2022, she broke the news to the guys that she was attempting a solo project. The band was touring Chvrches’ fourth album, “Screen Violence,” on which Mayberry exerted more influence by pushing for a general horror concept but then “secretly made a sad feminist album,” she said, drenching herself in fake blood for every performance.
“I didn’t want anybody to be blindsided,” Mayberry recalled of the announcement. “I understand there was an inbuilt fear that if the singer does something else, they won’t come back.” She described their reaction as “a coming-to-terms journey,” but Chvrches continued to tour, and it helped that the trio had committed to two more albums with their new Stateside label, Island Records, who are also releasing “Vicious Creature.”
At the suggestion of her management, Mayberry reunited with the producer Greg Kurstin, who worked on Chvrches’ third album, “Love Is Dead.” “I was so interested to hear where she was going musically,” Kurstin said, via phone. “The challenge was what kind of organic sounds can we use to create a different space from Chvrches that still fit with Lauren’s world?” The lush track “Sunday Best” opens with a homage to Fatboy Slim’s 1998 banger “Praise You” before deploying handclaps and strings to cushion Mayberry’s melancholic chorus about finding “freedom in goodbye.”
“I wanted to channel more primitive technology,” Kurstin added. “It could be electronic, but not electronic in the way of Chvrches.”
The title of the album comes from Mayberry’s lyric “nostalgia is a vicious creature” from the lilting pop track “A Work of Fiction.” On a drive to a nearby bar in late October, she wondered aloud what exactly she is wistful for. “Maybe for a time where I felt more innocent or something,” she said. Dressed in a My Bloody Valentine T-shirt, a black watch-plaid skirt and cherry-red sunglasses, Mayberry poked fun at herself for weeping at anything related to girlhood. She remembered crying in a Santa Clara, Calif., parking lot with her friend and choreographer Meagan Kong hours before one of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour performances.
“All these families traveled here for their daughters and they’re validating and centering her interests,” Mayberry said. “My friend was like, ‘We’re not even at the venue yet. You need to pace yourself.’”
While she waited for a lager, Mayberry chatted about her favorite TV shows. Even in her spare time she can’t escape her fascination with the misdeeds of men. Twenty minutes were spent discussing “Tell Me Lies,” Hulu’s tense Y.A. drama about a sociopathic boyfriend, before pivoting to “And Just Like That …,” which caused the fan favorite Aidan (John Corbett) to fall from her favor. “Hot take — Carrie should’ve ended up with the piss politician,” she said, referring to a “Sex and the City” character (John Slattery) with a memorable kink. “Aidan kept trying to change her.”
Mayberry will soon be preparing for a “Vicious Creature” tour that kicks off in early 2025, although she has already been playing songs from the album live for more than a year. “I wanted to get people familiar with the concept of this happening,” she said, “and learn a bit about what I am like on the stage without Iain and Martin.”
Her first solo show in late 2023 sold out the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., after the release of only one song, the piano ballad “Are You Awake?” “We’re playing venues that Chvrches played a decade ago,” she said. “People have come just to see what this might be like. I found that very moving.”
There’s at least one song that Mayberry has yet to perform live: the heartbreaking ballad “Oh, Mother.” Written with Mayberry’s friend McDougall and inspired by a family illness, the track flips the script on Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” to observe a parent from the shifting perspective of a daughter throughout various life stages. The effect is no less devastating when the plangent piano underscores Mayberry’s fragile concluding verse, “Oh, mother, what will I do without you?” It was the last thing they wrote for the record.
“We had a little sob and then got Nando’s,” she said, referring to the chicken joint that’s a U.K. favorite. “We’re British at the end of the day.”
Backed by an all-female and nonbinary band onstage, Mayberry possesses the same command as frontwoman that she did with Chvrches, but with more dramatic flourish. Her moves were conceived over wine nights with Kong, and later at a gym in nearby Pasadena. “Let’s Fosse the [expletive] out of it,” she recalled Kong saying. The mic stand is occasionally deployed as a phallic symbol during “Crocodile Tears,” and Mayberry sometimes opens the witchy, ambient track “Mantra” by sitting splayed on a box.
“My goal is to give the audience more to watch, especially when you’re trying to develop a new persona,” Kong said, via phone. “There’s no rules, which allowed some cool things that maybe she never would’ve done in Chvrches.”
After nearly two decades of playing in bands, Mayberry agreed that her experience as a solo artist has already allowed her a liberating amount of creative control. “I’m the grown-up in the room,” she said. “I can actually enjoy this for what it is.”
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