Into The Music
CHVRCHES had not played a live show together in almost three years. When they took the stage at the Royal Albert Hall on March 27 as part of Robert Smith’s Teenage Cancer Trust charity series, they could have played it safe. Run through the hits, say thank you, go home. That is not what happened.
Instead, Lauren Mayberry told the crowd the band had been making a record, and then they played something off it. The song is called “Conman,” and it is not what you might expect from the band that made “The Mother We Share.”
It opens with a pulsing, industrial bass. Mayberry’s vocals arrive with a line about a man made for the microphone who fills pockets full of stones, all his wives dancing on the edge of a knife. What follows is grating guitar riffs, urgent vocal cries, and a texture that sits closer to post-punk than synth-pop. “It’s going to surprise people, and I hope it’s going to delight them and rip some faces off,” Martin Doherty told NME earlier this month.
That description lands differently now that the song exists in the world.
CHVRCHES have always been a band that gets underestimated. They were filed under “synth-pop with pretty vocals” for years, which was accurate enough on the surface but missed a lot of what was actually going on underneath. The anxiety in Mayberry’s writing, the way the production would get serrated when you least expected it, the “How Not To Drown” collaboration with Robert Smith that hinted at a darker palette the band could access when they chose to. “Conman” suggests they chose to access it and kept going.
The context matters too. This was a charity show, a rare occasion, a room that already had an emotional charge. Playing an unreleased song under those conditions requires a certain confidence that what you have is worth the risk. Mayberry addressed this directly: “Be kind to us, we’ve never played this in front of human beings before.” The crowd was kind. More importantly, the song earned it.
Doherty confirmed the new album is about 90 percent complete. He and Jonny Scott also announced their debut album as their side project The Leaving, “Ultimate Buzz,” out April 24. CHVRCHES are clearly in a productive period, and “Conman” suggests the main event is going to be worth the wait.
The Teenage Cancer Trust series this year is curated by Smith and includes Garbage, Wolf Alice, Elbow, and My Bloody Valentine alongside CHVRCHES. It is a lineup that reads like a brief history of a certain strain of British and Scottish music that has always cared more about texture and feeling than trend cycles. CHVRCHES, on the evidence of “Conman,” are still very much in that tradition.
Whatever the new album sounds like in full, this first glimpse makes a strong case that they spent the past three years actually thinking about what they wanted to say.
“Sounds like a different band” is exactly the kind of description that makes me want to analyze what actually changed. From what I can read here, the shift sounds harmonic rather than rhythmic , CHVRCHES built their identity on Lauren Mayberry’s voice sitting high over very locked-in synth arrangements. If ‘Conman’ is departing from that template, the interesting question is whether the rhythm section has changed or whether it’s the harmonic language underneath. A different chord vocabulary can make the same instrumental lineup sound completely unrecognizable. Would love a deeper breakdown of what specifically felt different to people in the room.