Lauren Mayberry: Vicious Creature Tour

During the past decade as the frontwoman for groundbreaking electro-pop trio CHVRCHES, Lauren Mayberry has been asked about “being a girl in a band” more times than she could count. But that kind of othering and isolation is something she has always been used to as part of her creative world.

Mayberry still remembers what it felt like to sit alone in her teenage bedroom, headphones on, listening to artists like Tori Amos and Fiona Apple as if it was some kind of private spiritual practice. “It was a lot of confessional female singer-songwriters, music that I knew people I was in bands with had no interest in” she says, “and I thought of them like, ‘These are my friends who live in my headphones.’ Something that was just for me.” Growing up in Scotland, Mayberry began playing piano and drums in her early teens. By 15, she had started playing in bands, learning how to get her ideas across in environments where her gender often felt an obstacle, or a kind of invisibility cloak. Although there was plenty of music she and her male bandmates could agree on, she knew from experience that it would be an uphill battle getting them into Tori or Fiona or PJ Harvey or Kathleen Hanna.

But in 2023, with the approach of the 10th anniversary of CHVRCHES' groundbreaking debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, Mayberry felt reflective in a way she hadn’t anticipated. Looking back at all of the incredible moments of personal evolution and musical growth during her years with the band, she realized that she had hit a creative wall that she wanted to move through. Much like the artists who only lived in her headphones as a teenager, there was a part of her own artistry she had locked away. She says, “There’s things I’ve never been comfortable performing or sharing with a band of men. As much as my time with the band has always had this feminist narrative underpinning it, a lot of my role felt like it was more about me trying to fit in than leading the conversation, and I wondered what it would look like for me to create under different circumstances.”

With Vicious Creature, her debut solo album, Mayberry was seeking freedom from rules and expectations and preconceptions. The album title comes from a lyric: “Nostalgia is such a vicious creature, another way to say that you fear the future” (from “A Work Of Fiction’). “Obsession with the past has always been a difficult thing for me,” she explains. “I hold onto things like a dog, to be honest, and I stay loyal to people long past the point that it’s logical or healthy. Nostalgia makes me romanticize people and places that weren’t really good for me, or obsessively dwell on things that have happened. It makes it hard for me to move on sometimes. And I think that is what so much of starting this solo journey was always about for me: trying to find a way to get unstuck and to move on, in my life and in my creativity.

Mayberry started writing her solo material in the past two years. Her goal, when starting work on Vicious Creature, was to push herself harder than ever before to excavate a new level of musical truth from the depths of her creative soul, and to create a record that accessed joy and theatricality in a way she hadn’t been able to in her previous projects.

As she got into the mindset of finally making something truly her own, Mayberry’s mood board for the album culled a wide array of inspiration. She reconnected with the influence of ‘90s British girl groups like All Saints and Sugababes, as well as artists she fell for during her university days, such as Annie Lennox, Jenny Lewis and Sleater-Kinney. “Those are artists I love, who are very formative to how I think about music and approach music,” Mayberry says, adding that musicals like Cabaret and Chicago were also something she thought about – things that dig into the dark, physical and subversive sides of femininity. “Especially when it came to the visuals for the album, I knew I wanted them to be a part of the storytelling in a way I haven’t been able to do previously. I wanted to have an ownership over my physical self and how I was involved in the visual part of the storytelling, so I felt like I was in the driving seat of the aesthetic rather than fitting into a landscape that wasn’t really for me.”

She began the music by teaming up with a few key collaborators who helped give shape to the first few singles. Mayberry partnered with Tobias Jesso, Jr. and Matthew Koma for the beautiful, unadorned piano ballad “Are You Awake?” – a song about the loneliness that can come along with a life on the road – and followed with the defiant, leftfield pop masterpiece “Shame,” co-written with Koma and Caroline Pennell. Reminiscent of Love. Angel. Music. Baby.-era Gwen Stefani, “Shame” is one of several songs on the album where Mayberry has been able to write about sexuality, gender and empowerment from a profoundly personal perspective for the first time, exploring themes and styles that hadn’t felt quite right for CHVRCHES.

On “Crocodile Tears” and “Mantra”, written with Koma and Ethan Gruska, Mayberry wanted to adopt “a sort of character where I could really let go of the idea that I need to ‘nice’, because I think that holds so many women back in their lives. If I didn’t have to be seen as ‘nice’, I would feel comfortable telling certain people to fuck off when they treat me like shit – on this record, in these songs, I get to do that.”

Although Mayberry entered the process looking for this more escapist, character-driven approach, circumstances in her personal life led her to some more introspective territory – something she found later in the album process, when she struck creative gold with her friend, producer Dan McDougall.

“Some people you write with can just create a sense of calm and ease and comfort,” Mayberry says of McDougall, who co-wrote the Brit Pop-infused “Something in the Air,” the helter skelter pop-rock “Punch Drunk,” the album’s only acoustic guitar moment “Anywhere But Dancing,” and “Oh, Mother” – the latter arguably Mayberry’s most personal lyrics to date, informed by family illness.

“Dan is not only a sensitive, thoughtful person, he’s also very funny, interesting and a light-hearted guy,” she continues. “That balance is really helpful for me. If I want to say a sarcastic, self-deprecating thing, he’ll go along with it and we’ll make jokes back and forth. But when we talk about heavy things, he’ll go there with me, too. I don’t know if I’d have been able to write something so personal with someone who didn’t know me as well. Dan is such a great Swiss Army knife of a creator, and it's very fun to crack a lyric like the ones on “Oh, Mother” in the presence of another lyrics bitch.”
For “Sunday Best,” (a song Mayberry says is about “looking for light and hope when struggling with grief”), Mayberry reunited with Greg Kurstin, who produced much of CHVRCHES 2018 album Love Is Dead and whose earlier credits include Mayberry favorites by Lily Allen and Kylie Minogue and All Saints, among others.Mayberry says it was also a thrill to work with someone with such deep connections to some of the music that had influenced her sound. “Greg really understood the references I was talking about,” Mayberry notes. “I love how the song ended up feeling vast and cinematic and cinematic, but still scuzzy and strange,” she says. “That’s my favorite kind of pop music: it focuses on feelings but also imperfections.”

In discovering who she is as a solo artist, Mayberry has accessed a new world of inspiration, and a deep well of creativity she’s had within her all along. “So much of this process has been an exercise in empowering myself to listen to my own intuition – something I really trained myself out of,” she says. “That's ultimately why you started making things, is because you felt a feeling, and you wanted to articulate that somehow. I think it was important for me to relearn that kind of independence, and recognise what I bring to any table I choose to sit at.”