It’s only been two years since the synth-pop trio Chvrches put out a record, 2018’s Love Is Dead, but in that time a lot has changed in pop music. This year, one of their songs off that record, “Forever,” got a “separate but together” performance video after its placement in the Netflix show Elite helped spike popularity.
And don’t worry, the group aren’t planning to go full folk-pop like Taylor Swift, but frontwoman Lauren Mayberry did tell The Guardian recently that another pop star has influenced the direction of their fourth album.
“The vocal production on the Billie Eilish album is absolutely phenomenal — that is an advancement in pop music,” Mayberry began. Noting that her bandmates “Iain and Martin like to be across what is happening for production stuff.” She continued: “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 popularized by other people. How do you run that race next to other people? Well, we’ve realized 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.”
Still, their next album, which the piece stated is set for an early 2021 release, is going to be different than the first three. “It’s definitely got the Chvrches DNA, but I don’t think that these songs could slot into any of the first three records,” Mayberry said. “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. 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.”
Read the full Guardian interview here, and look out for new music from Chvrches coming very soon.