NEW YORK (AP) — The birth of Lauren Mayberry as a solo artist should be marked by something like a wolf cry. And that's exactly what it sounds like.
The vocalist and percussionist from the Scottish pop band Chvrches has punctuated her debut album with a playful howl while telling off an ex-lover on the song “Crocodile Tears.”
“This moment in time is exactly the chapter where I get to howl like a wolf in a song if I want to. And I don’t have to feel weird about it,” she says.
Mayberry, 37, is enjoying the freedom to create whatever she likes, away from the synth-pop of the band she has been with since her early 20s.
"It’s a mission statement of all things that you like, and you just go in and write the song that feels like it wants to be written on that day, which was quite refreshing," she says.
The 12 tracks of “Vicious Creature,” out Dec. 6 via Island, veer from the coffee house folk of “Anywhere But Dancing” to the punky “Punch Drunk,” the dance-pop of “Change Shapes” and stuttering glam of “Sorry, Etc.”
If Chvrches — with members Iain Cook and Martin Doherty — usually works first with melodies and production before lyrics, Mayberry wanted to reverse the process.
“I knew that I wanted it to be more focused on the storytelling,” she says. “It was nice to be able to go into a studio with a title idea or with a concept and then work back from that.”
Mayberry cites Sinead O'Connor, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple and Annie Lennox as influences. She credits the yodel inflection in her voice to having listened to so much Alanis Morissette.
“It was those influences I wanted to dig into a bit more in my own material,” she says. “When I thought back to what are the key influences on me as a writer, it isn’t really a lot of synth-pop stuff. So then it’s interesting that that’s what I became so associated with."
Mayberry worked on her new album with producers Greg Kurstin, Matthew Korma, Tobias Jesso Jr., Ethan Gruska and Dan McDougall. She started writing in spring 2022 and had studio sessions in between touring with Chvrches.
McDougall, who has previously worked with Sigrid and Jason Mraz, co-wrote and played on four tracks and says he and Mayberry went into the studio hoping to push the boundaries.
“We didn’t really have one specific lane in mind for the genre we were going down," he says. "We were just being experimental, and I guess the freedom within that just brought us something a bit different.”
One track — “Sunday Best” — was in part inspired by “Once In a Lifetime” by Talking Heads and by her mother's illness. "Keep thinking one day maybe I will find the beauty in goodbye,” she sings. The title comes from funeral clothes.
“I thought I was finally writing a hopeful, cheerful, uplifting song, and then I was like, 'Well, still about death, isn’t it?'” Mayberry says, laughing. “Maybe it's a Scottish thing. I don’t know. We’re just a bit morose.”
On the album, Mayberry explores mortality, nostalgia, societal pressures, arrogant exes and her band ("I killed myself to be one of the boys,” she sings in one song.)
“The lyrics I like least that I’ve written are ones that I know didn’t feel very authentic to me,” she says. “I think you can hear in somebody’s physical voice when they’re singing, whether they mean something or not. So my only brief is like, 'Does it feel fake?'”
Regardless of how the album does with critics or charts, Mayberry is proud it's out there, proof of her musicianship and confirmation that she doesn't need anyone to make good songs.
"No matter what happens with this record, I feel like it was more about proving to myself than to anybody else. Because if you never try it, then you’re never going to know."
The album ends with the somber piano-led “Are You Awake?” as Mayberry takes a hard look at her life choices. Her friends have settled down — “Been counting their babies and their diamond wedding rings” — and her career expectations are heavy: “Hometown hero is a poisoned chalice choice," she sings.
“The end of that song opens up in a way to a question mark. And I think that’s kind of how I feel about what will happen after the rest of this," she says.
Mayberry isn't sure what's next for Chvrches. The three members have been working on their own projects and the door seems open for a reunion despite Mayberry spreading her wings.
“It’s hard once you’ve felt the wind in your hair to not enjoy that as an experience,” she says. “But my hope is that the two things can coexist. I do think that everybody getting experiences outside of the band will mean that we have different things to offer each other when we come to write again.”
Mark Kennedy, The Associated Press