In late 2019, CHVRCHES frontwoman Lauren Mayberry found an old document of names the Glasgow three-piece had once considered for their band. “I saw ‘Screen Violence’ and thought there could be something in it,” she tells Apple Music. “It had multiple meanings to us at that time.” It wasn’t just that it encapsulated a horror movie aesthetic the trio have always been drawn to. It was also that Mayberry had, at that point, been experiencing her own version of “screen violence”. While touring the band’s 2018 album Love Is Dead, she was facing near-constant death threats from strangers online, leading her to weigh up the pros and cons of even being in the band. “Everyone’s like, ‘Don’t listen to the haters.’ But there’s a difference between not listening and being worried that someone’s going to murder you,” she says. “Coming up with that title and the concept felt quite cathartic and reassuring.” But when the global pandemic took hold, its title took on an even greater resonance as everything shifted onto screens—including the creation of the record, mostly worked on in 2020 over video sessions between LA (where Mayberry, along with bandmate and multi-instrumentalist Martin Doherty, are based) and Glasgow (home to CHVRCHES’ third member, Iain Cook). And so, alongside fear, confusion and misogyny, there are also explorations of isolation and homesickness, all set against a tight electro-pop palette that’s by turns anxious (“Violent Delights”, “Nightmares”), dreamy (“California”) and wistful (outro “Better If You Don’t”, a love letter to Glasgow). And despite the heavy subject matter that fuelled this album, CHVRCHES have rarely felt—or sounded—better. “Sometimes you can hear that a band phoned it in and that their hearts weren’t in it some way,” says Doherty. “I feel like every inch of ourselves went into this record. It wasn’t always an easy thing to make, for obvious reasons, and at times we had to push ourselves to the edge to make it. When this band is going well, there’s a romance and excitement that you don’t feel with anyone else.” Read on as CHVRCHES walk us through their fourth record, one song at a time. “Asking for a Friend” Lauren Mayberry: “This song is depressing but hopeful. It took a while to get the lyrics right, because the track has such a profound feel to it. If I put the wrong lyric on here, it would fuck everything up. The track felt like a cool chapter one: It’s about regret and loneliness and it’s quite vulnerable and raw. But then it’s like, ’Well, why do you feel those things?’ The next chapters are about going back to tell the rest of that story.” “He Said She Said” Martin Doherty: “The chords felt like they had this eternal tension in them—they never actually release, even though they get really big. It feels to me like a panic attack, with this grounding force of the drums, which were rigid and quite slow and which are at half the speed of the track.” LM: “I liked that the percussion felt more aggressive than anything we’d done in a long time, and that informed the lyrics. It’s interesting to see how people have responded to this song, as we didn’t set out to write a message song.” “California” MD: “Everyone who moves to LA does a California song, so we were conscious of not doing that. But no one ever makes songs about the dark side of what happens if you get stuck here and you’re a failure and your entire life almost becomes somewhat meaningless and you have to retreat. Lauren came in with those lyrics and it was like, ‘I guess we’re going there.’ The juxtaposition with the sound makes sense with that meaning—if it was all about how great it was to live in LA, it would be a terrible mistake.” “Violent Delights” MD: “Iain and I talk about Music for the Jilted Generation by The Prodigy and how it’s such an influential British electronic album. This song is definitely a nod to it. I just thought it sounded like a night terror. That inspired us to go even harder on the track.” LM: “At first I worried it would be pretentious to put Shakespeare references into the album, but I’d rewatched Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet and I found the phrase ‘violent delights’ really evocative. I feel like we’re all morbidly fascinated with the violence that happens to other people. The verse lyrics are actually a series of nightmares that I’d been having. In a hotel room on tour, I dreamed that people were trying to get into the room, and once woke up having piled a bunch of pillows and stuff up against the door—with no memory of doing it. It’s your subconscious telling you your house is on fire and you need to get out. The wheels were coming off.” “How Not to Drown” [with Robert Smith] MD: “I use writing as a coping mechanism to find better balance as I don’t handle the constant moving around very well. We happened to be in a venue with an old beaten-up piano on it. I started playing around, bashing chords out like the way they ended up in the song. Our manager knows what huge fans we are of The Cure, and—without telling us—was trying to get us a support slot. Then he said, ‘Robert Smith has emailed me, what do we want?’ We said, ‘Let’s send him a bunch of music. The ultimate dream would be for him to sing on this record.’ A while later, we got an email out of the blue on Halloween with him singing on this track.” LM: “I’d been reading a lot of Virginia Woolf. She killed herself by drowning herself, which is quite dark. We always talk about how water and water imagery comes up a lot in my lyric writing. It was time to figure out why that was. I feel like it’s all a metaphor for drowning under something. But we’re here and Robert Smith’s on the song, so it’s really good.” “Final Girl” LM: “I watched so many horror movies to research this album. There’s something about the female experience in horror that you can relate to—the feeling of being watched and hunted and chased, which has been a big part of my relationship with being a woman, I guess.” MD: “When Lauren came in with the chorus, I was like, ‘Look, if you want to leave [the band], just leave.’ The lyric literally said, ‘I should quit and go get married.’” “Good Girls” LM: “We’d been having this discussion about struggling with the idea of male heroes who do terrible things and how you—as a fan or a listener or viewer—sit with those things. I’ve always struggled with it. I find it hard to be emotionally vulnerable with someone as a listener if I know they think certain things. But then I was just thinking about the time and energy we’ve spent being stressed about that and trying to figure out how to live with that. We don’t spend as much time worrying about the people who are the subject of the behaviour.” “Lullabies” MD: “We could do a whole interview about how important [Scottish band] The Blue Nile is to us, coming from Glasgow. They truly manifest the sound of the city, and when I listen, I’m immediately transported home. I was homesick and really longing for Glasgow, and that’s where those sounds—especially the strings on this song—come from.” “Nightmares” LM: “This is the only song on the record that’s about relationships. The verses are about relationships, then the choruses are about me being frustrated at writing about relationships. It feels like you’re trapped in this horrible repeating saga.” Iain Cook: “There’s spoken word at the end of this. A song we’ve been trying to pay homage to for many years in this band is ‘Waking the Witch’ by Kate Bush. When the almost scary groove kicks in, there’s this chopped-up, sort of frantic-sounding spoken word, which has always been such an evocative thing. We’ve always wanted to find a way to reference it.” “Better If You Don’t” MD: “This song was almost like a love letter to our lineage as musicians. What did we sound like when we were in Glasgow, even before CHVRCHES? And what does a Tuesday at 11 am in Glasgow sound like when it’s raining so hard that you’d rather be anywhere else on Earth, but you still love it somehow? I actually wrote this song on a rare day in LA when it was pissing down and I was just watching the rain and singing, taking myself back to the old days.” LM: “When you can’t go home to a place or a time, there’s a grief to that. This song looks like a night out in rainy Glasgow when I was 22. I can’t go back to any of that—it literally doesn’t exist. I googled ‘sad about the passing of time’ and all these people said, ‘[That happens] to everyone. Get over it!’”