“When I started thinking about writing my own stuff, I definitely remember being in a tourbus and Googling, ‘How old was Gwen Stefani?’ ‘How old was Annie Lennox?’,” recalls Lauren Mayberry. “I was worried at the age of 35 that I’d left it too late. It’s quite dark and quite sinister. I remember growing up in the era of media when they were fucking disgusting to Madonna, like ’Look at this old hag and what she’s wearing’ and she was fucking 40 years old. There’s things that you don’t realise that we internalise into our world view that are just completely made-up misogyny.”
Zooming in midway through a hectic album release week that’s involved a last minute dash across the Atlantic at the behest of Jimmy Kimmel, we’re speaking to a black rectangle in the place where the CHVRCHES frontwoman-turned-solo-star should be. She pops her camera on briefly by way of explanation: “I had a phoner at 8am and a phoner at 9am so I thought I could wash my hair in the middle. Had the hairdryer worked it would have been a seamless plan…”
We’ll forgive Mayberry’s temporary sogginess; since announcing the overdue release of debut ‘Vicious Creatures’, originally slated for summer but pushed back to this month due to various unavoidable delays, the Stirling-born singer’s calendar has been booked and busy. Far from leaving it too late, the dawn of Lauren Mayberry The Pop Star has been a riveting arrival to watch precisely because of the lessons and life experience that these tracks hold within them. “I do feel like so much of it is just grappling to find your way back to something like joy because, if anything, we need that more now than we ever did,” she suggests. “So the idea of being like, ‘Well, you’re over 35, no more joy for you! You’ve been creating things all your life but time’s up, you can’t create anything anymore!’ [is ridiculous].”
Since forming CHVRCHES at the turn of the 2010s with bandmates Iain Cook and Martin Doherty, life for Mayberry has been, it seems, a mix of both wild success and underlying panic. Swiftly signed to Virgin, the trio released debut album ‘The Bones of What You Believe’ less than 18 months after uploading their first ever song onto an early internet blog. Having played in bands but never fronted them, she recalls the experience of learning on the job and in front of the world as like “being forged in the fire”. “It didn’t feel like it came from a place of knowledge or security or empowerment, it was just like: QUICKLY! ARGH!” she laughs. “Whereas with this, I just wanted to be more – for lack of a less 2024 word – present with it and more connected to myself and less disassociated when I was playing.
“I’m very conscious that making music and having people give a shit about it isn’t a given, so because [CHVRCHES] were so stressed about doing it ‘right’ or doing a good job, we weren’t really taking a lot of it on board. It was more like, ‘OK what’s next? Got to keep doing a good job so it doesn’t go away’,” she continues. With her solo work, part of the MO was to slow down and allow herself to somewhat smell the roses, but the act of “spending the fucks on the bits that are worth it” also freed up other parts of herself too. “It was nice to create something like this and think, just don’t take it all so fucking seriously,” Mayberry nods. “Creativity doesn’t really thrive under those conditions, so it was nice to try and take the pressure off and then different things did come to the surface. ‘Change Shapes’ is the most sugar pop thing that I’ve written probably ever.”
That single – a delectable mix of bubbling synths, sassy hand claps and a freewheeling melodic pay-off – musically represents the apex of the more playful, pop-leaning palette that Mayberry wanted to lean into (she’s cited All Saints, Sugababes and the musical Cabaret as influences). However, lyrically it reveals a more complex underbelly. Alongside meditations on inter-generational family relationships (‘Oh, Mother’) and toxic romantic partners (‘Crocodile Tears’), a collection of tracks within ‘Vicious Creature’ specifically address Mayberry’s experiences in the industry. Where ‘Change Shapes’ speaks of morphing and adapting to get what you need, the punky ‘Sorry Etc’ spits back far more vitriolically: “I killed myself to be one of the boys”.
Speaking today, Mayberry is cautious of how she addresses these themes. They’re not, she’s keen to state, an attack on her old bandmates but a comment on the industry as a whole and the additional demands placed on women to find their place within it; evidently, not everyone has interpreted the tracks that way. “I’m sure there are a bunch of dudes on Reddit who are like, ‘She’s so ungrateful to the band and she’s always playing the victim’. But I write songs about my experiences and how they made me feel, and I wasn’t conscious as a 23-year-old of how odd a lot of those experiences were,” she says.
“There would be times in the band where I was the only woman in most rooms and that was just how it was. Now I can look back and say that, yeah, it was quite an isolating experience. I wouldn’t change any of it because you get the good and the bad as with everything, but I have definitely spent a lot of time trying to fit into something and analysing what I think they want from me: ‘If I do less of this and more of this then they’ll like me better’. And I think that’s a flawed outlook because that’s not gonna make anybody happy, but that wisdom can only be earned with time.”
Where the ‘00s indie world was a distinctly male and largely homogeneous environment, however, the pop landscape in 2024 couldn’t be a better one for Mayberry to be stepping into. With diverse and personality-driven artists climbing to the top of the pile, and many having fought for years to get there, the culture is as hungry for authenticity as it’s ever been. “Even a few years ago, that’s not what was celebrated and doing well,” she nods. “Charli or Chappell Roan, they’ve been grinding out what they believe in for such a long time and that’s really inspiring: artists making the art that they want to make in the way they want to make it. It’s been really exciting seeing that connect with people and Charli’s like, ‘I fucking told you guys! I’ve been telling you this for a decade!’”
Lauren Mayberry might not have clocked in a decade of pop star hours yet, but she has spent that time and longer in music’s trenches. Having achieved huge success in a world that often felt like it wasn’t built for her, now she’s enjoying the freedom of ditching the boys’ club and just having fun. “We always talk a good game of ‘artists should make the art they want to make when they really feel like they want to make it’ and I don’t know sometimes if I follow through with that,” she says, “but with this I was like, yes. You felt like you wanted to make something and you did it. And this record is not the end or a conclusion; it feels like I’ve opened up a chapter.”
