Lauren Maybery spoke about the upcoming Chvrches album, which is slated for release in spring 2021, in a recent interview with The Guardian. She explained that the as-yet-untitled project has “definitely got the Chvrches DNA” but that the songs on it couldn’t “slot into any of the first three records.”
“You want it to be like your band, but you want it to be enough of an evolution that it’s not the same thing over and over again,” she added. “But how do you do that? Especially with modern-day pop music where there’s a pressure to take your sound and put it through the filter of what is popular. I think you can tell that it’s us – it’s not screamo or anything like that.”
When asked whether they felt pressured to keep up with the changes in pop music, the Chvrches frontwoman brought up Billie Eilish‘s debut album: “The vocal production on the Billie Eilish album is absolutely phenomenal – that is an advancement in pop music,” she said. “We want to be aware of it because there’s just awesome pop music and you can learn something from it. Learn the production tricks but don’t learn the other parts: I think that was the challenge of this album. We did two albums that existed in a certain space, and by the third record it felt like what we were doing had been popularised by other people. How do you run that race next to other people? Well, we’ve realised that we don’t have to run that race. You’re never going to win in a race that is saturated by people who are bigger, better and more popular, so you might as well pivot and go somewhere else.”
You can read the full interview here. Chvrches’ last album was 2018’s Love is Dead.