Some albums hit you like a hammer. Others sneak up like a ghost. Screen Violence is the latter — spectral, seductive, and a little too real for comfort. And Lauren Mayberry knows it.
She’s not wrong. Screen Violence does sound like CHVRCHES at their most distilled — all synth and shadow, vulnerability wrapped in neon light. But beneath the shimmering surfaces, Mayberry is exorcising demons with a scalpel.
“There’s a lot of drowning, falling, dying on this record,” she says. “And yet, somehow, it’s not depressing. I hope it’s about perseverance — trying to find peace in a space where peace is pretty hard to come by.”
It wasn’t meant to be a horror record. Not at first. “I thought it would be escapist,” she says. “Just something fun, like a concept. But I wrote a few songs and was like... it’s not just that, is it?”
It wasn’t.
The horror genre became a mirror — both for CHVRCHES and for Mayberry herself. “I think a lot of women who love horror love it because it makes them feel sane,” she explains. “That sense of being watched, hunted, always running — trying to stay safe in a universe that doesn’t feel safe for you. It resonates.”
It’s more than just metaphor. In 2019, Mayberry found herself the target of a particularly venomous online backlash — a media firestorm sparked by the band’s criticism of certain artist collaborations. “No amount of media training can prepare you for waking up every day to death threats,” she says. “People say ‘the internet’s not real,’ but it feels real. It chips away at you.”
And yet, she kept showing up. “You show no weakness, no mercy. You keep going,” she says. “But eventually, you look around and realize — some stuff went wrong inside my aquarium.”
That aquarium — cracked and full of ghosts — became the setting for Screen Violence. It’s not all darkness, though. There’s playfulness too, especially in the band’s long-awaited cover of “Cry Little Sister” from The Lost Boys, a song they’d been pitching to cover since the beginning. “Radio stations always shot it down,” she laughs. “They’d say, ‘Just do something from the top 40.’”
But when Netflix’s Nightbooks came knocking, the band finally got their vampire moment — just in time for a crossover with their horror-influenced LP. “It was perfect,” Mayberry says. “The lyrics are… odd. But it fit. And it was full circle. We even met Kiefer Sutherland once. I think we accosted him in a radio hallway.”
John Carpenter, meanwhile, actually did respond to their email. “We had this idea — what if we got horror composers to do remixes?” she says. “I was walking around my kitchen and texted our manager, like, ‘You know, someone like John Carpenter.’ By the time I finished the list, he’d already emailed Carpenter, and he’d said yes.”
Robert Smith said yes too. And contributed vocals to “How Not to Drown,” a song born from a four-page emotional screed Mayberry had written in one of her notebooks. “Working with him was surreal,” she says. “He’s self-deprecating, very kind, but he knows what The Cure means to people. There’s a specific kind of generosity in that.”
If Smith is a musical icon who still understands humility, Mayberry is navigating what it means to be on the other side of that myth — the idol and the person. “There’s this mythologizing that happens,” she says. “And I’ve experienced it too, growing up watching Shirley Manson and thinking I knew her from the music videos. It’s weird to become that for someone else.”
She’s not one to hold her tongue on the contradictions of that dynamic. “Good Girls” opens with a line that lands like a thesis: Kill your idols and never be afraid. It came, she says, from a long pub conversation about separating art from artist — specifically, male artists with horrific reputations.
“I was definitely the most sensitive in the group, and then I looked around and realized… everyone else at the table was a dude,” she says. “We never have those conversations about female artists. And none of the stuff they were excusing would’ve ever happened to them. So for them, it was academic. For me, it’s emotional.”
That’s the core of Screen Violence: turning personal pain into catharsis, not erasure. “There’s two modes of CHVRCHES writing,” Mayberry says. “One where I admit all the things I hate about myself. And one where I imagine who I wish I could be. Good Girls is that second one — like, wouldn’t it be great if I could just say all this shit without apology?”
Now, removed from the album’s release, she hears something else in it. Not just darkness. Not just horror. But the sound of someone surviving.
“I hope it sounds like trying to find peace,” she says. “Even in a world where none of us really feel safe. Especially then.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
