In 2013, Lauren Mayberry wrote a newspaper column titled “I will not accept online misogyny”. Her band, Chvrches, a synth-pop trio from Glasgow, was just taking off. As the frontwoman, Mayberry was on the receiving end of a barrage of online messages from men, from objectification and abuse (“bitch”, “slut”) to rape threats. “Why,” Mayberry responded, “should women ‘deal’ with this?”
With depressing predictability, Mayberry’s words didn’t stem the tide. Like other women in the public eye, she’s endured years of online attacks. “When we were on tour, around 2019, there was a lot of violence in the atmosphere,” Mayberry tells me, speaking from a hotel in Frankfurt where she’s on tour with the band London Grammar. “As a woman in the world, there are things you know to be afraid of. Then, you’re on tour, and you’re thinking, ‘Everybody knows where we are, because it’s listed on our website.’ There were people putting threats on specific shows. Someone in America sent us a picture of a gun, and said, ‘I’m going to shoot you on-stage at this show at this time.’ When I did eventually go and speak to someone about it, they were, like, ‘You’ve got a form of PTSD—a kind of preoccupation with mortality. Because it’s on the internet, people think it doesn’t matter or it’s not real, but I don’t think your brain or nervous system can make the distinction.”
Mayberry, who’s currently based in Los Angeles, has long since reduced direct online contact with trolls—the band pays other people to handle their social channels. But shouldn’t social media companies be clamping down on abusive accounts? “I wonder,” says Mayberry. “I don’t know how social media companies can be made more accountable or can make people more accountable, or legally how you could do that. It’s weird—people will say, ‘It’s just the internet,’ and I’m, like, no, a human being sat there and wrote that, and then go off to their job or chat to their wife. That’s what makes it scarier to me.”
Trolls aside, the decade or so that Mayberry’s spent with Chvrches has been a blast. Formed in Glasgow with Iain Cook and Martin Doherty, the band recorded four acclaimed albums, from their 2013 debut The Bones of What You Believe to 2021’s Screen Violence, collaborating with the likes of Matt Berninger from the National and Robert Smith from the Cure, as well as touring the world.
In September 2023, though, Mayberry announced plans to go solo, releasing her first single and playing live shows with an all-female band. Her first solo album, Vicious Creature, which came out on 6th December, is more directly “pop” than Chvrches: an eclectic set that ranges from acoustic guitar and piano ballads to 1980s- and 1990s-inspired dance anthems. Some lyrics suggest Mayberry has felt the need—in the band and in relationships—to please other people at a cost to herself. (“I killed myself to be one of the boys… / I’m a doll inside a box” she sings on the punky “Sorry, Etc”.) “I look back at certain times, my twenties especially, and I spent so much time figuring out what other people wanted me to do, what everybody wanted me to be,’ Mayberry tells me. “I was always trying to figure out how to code-switch to an environment.”
Mayberry and Chvrches have supported numerous causes and organisations, including Amnesty International, Wild Aid and Rape Crisis Glasgow. She prefers to put her time and money where it can do some good, rather than arguing on X. “I feel it’s important that fans of the band know, if they care to, where I stand on certain things. But I don’t feel it’s productive to get into a slanging match with someone online.”
She’ll spend several months of 2025 touring the new album, including UK dates in March.
On hold, rather than permanently split, Chvrches are also expected to reconvene next year. “Recording with Robert Smith was definitely beyond the ‘bucket list’—it’s not something I would even have considered possible,” Mayberry reflects. “Any wishes or dreams I had for Chvrches were surpassed within about six months. I didn’t know that I should dream bigger than that. We were very lucky. I hope there are more pages in that book.”
