2013 has been a great year for music, but one band has stood out among the many quality releases. Scottish born Chvrches, made up of Lauren Mayberry (lead vocals, additional synthesizers and samplers), Iain Cook (synthesizers, guitar, bass, vocals), and Martin Doherty (synthesizers, samplers, vocals), started out with a few tracks leaking onto the internet through services like Hype Machine and other EDM blogs as early as May 2012 - the synth pop trio was soon gracing the front pages of Pitchfork, The Guardian and other more mainstream publications. By the time they finally released their first studio album, The Bones of What You Believe , on September 20th, 2013, many of the album's singles, including "The Mother We Share,""Recover," and "Gun," were already embedded permanently in many of our heads.
To say I was excited to speak with Doherty ahead of their RVA appearance at the National next Friday night is an understatement. It's rare that I really fanboy out when doing an interview, but I found myself babbling like a school girl throughout our brief conversation. But to Doherty's credit, he was humble, grateful, and, in general, and incredibly cool guy. Check out our interview below, and be sure to pick up some tickets for next week's show - or at least buy The Bones of What You believe.
(We've also got tickets to give away until 5 PM today, click here to enter for your chance to win)
When you were putting stuff together did you see yourselves as something really different? Like when you were pressing record or when you were listening to track mixes were you like "holy shit, this is awesome"?
Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know if there was a kind of "holy shit" moment but I kind of sensed that when we started working together in Chrvches… those early recordings we did felt like an energy and excitement in the studio that I’ve never had before when working with people. It felt good in a way that was new to all of us I think. The actual kind of album process, the recording all happened really quickly in terms of the actual songwriting. And of course we spent a long time making sure that everything sounded the way we wanted it to. But yeah, there was definitely an energy about what we were doing - that was new to me and that was really exciting.
You guys are playing down here in Richmond in November I believe …
We are. It’s going to be cool.
We’re going to do everything we can to get you as much support as we can down here.
Oh that’s great. I’ve never been to Richmond before, that’d be lovely.
It’s got really good food culture which is good because there’s not much else.
Well that’s good for us, because that’s usually the big question of the day. You know, they Yelp all the good places and find the best places to eat.
So you have a song on the new FIFA game soundtrack, I know I’d be excited.
Hugely excited.
Has there been a particular point or a particular group or person or compliment that you’ve received that’s really stood out to you over the last couple of months?
You know, it’s an interesting one. We try whenever possible not to let our heads get carried away, you know, with what people are writing and what people are saying. The support that we've had, it’s incredible and we're really appreciative of it. It’s hard if you've never received that kind of attention before, so I think a lot of that was about, while it was still happening we were in the studio making a record. That kind of thing, reading the press and seeing what people are saying, it can be a slippery slope.
There was one thing that happened just earlier this week actually. We were playing a festival in Detroit with Sigur Ros and we are about to go to onstage and Jonsi [Sigur Ros singer/guitarist] was onside the stage. So they watched the show from inside the stage, and I've been a huge Sigur Ros fan forever. That was really nice. And he came backstage after the show, and we met the guys and all that. That was a really nice moment.
There's a lot of vague stuff written about how you all came together - how did the three of you come together to form this project?
Right. It was the very end of 2011 and Ian and I finally sat down in the studio after talking about it for years. We’d always been friends, we kind of worked in production capacity together, but never actually written together. And we did some demos.It was at that time he had played me some stuff that he was working on with Lauren, and I immediately thought there was something unique and amazing about her voice. It was just instantly like, "We have to figure out what to do, and try stuff out to see if she might be interested in working with us."
And it was then that it all started snowballing, as soon as the first sessions. The feel was right together. A few songs started coming out, and coming out fast. All of those sessions came to form the basis of the album. We recorded maybe 3/4 of the record before we put anything online. Production changed and ideas were traded, but those songs were... it was important we had songs to back up the others up. Just in case people were interested in it and it started to pick up steam - we didn't want to brand ourselves a band with one song. And that is how we did it.
Well, your entire album is really strong - that's something I noticed when we got an early stream of The Bones of What You Believe. There's really not a bad song on it, and that's so rare these days.
It’s really nice that you can say that. We put a lot of effort as to the record as a whole. We’re not a band that subscribes to the idea that we have 3 or 4 singles as the strongest thing and the rest is just filler. We don't consider the album to be dead as a format, and we really sequenced the album in that way and spent a lot of time on every song for that reason.
It's interesting you say that, because your songs really trickled out at first - with gaps between individual releases. Did you guys ever consider doing a less traditional album release, or was it from the get go, "We have to do an entire record"?
Like I was saying, we had all that material, but at the time were completely unsigned. We were just doing it part time when we could. We worked together whenever our jobs would allow us to do that. The way those songs got people's attention was just dipping our toes in the water. And I guess that’s the way blogs work and the way that the internet works, where people share, and it’s a song to song basis. You kind of slowly piece together an impression of a band rather than dumping a full record on the spot, instead of everyone having an album to form an opinion on. It never occurred to us that we would do the whole thing one by one. Once we had labels in place and a real idea of where we are going, everything was focused on making that album work.
Your sound is very electronic, or at least, it seems readymade for some quality remixes. I know you've already got a number of remixes out there, but are there any producers or DJs that you personally would love to work with on some of your songs?
Yeah, I mean for sure. I’m a big fan of electronic music in general, and then there’s a number of producers I’d love to work with, I love to hear remix. People like this producer from [Glasgow] called Rustie. If he got to work on something that’d be real sick.
Was the writing process pretty collaborative, or did any one person take on a stronger role? Was anybody writing lyrics and somebody else doing melodies, or was it all kind of coming together as one unit?
Well see, I think when you have a band that has only three people in it, that it's more of a democratic process. The interesting thing about this band is that there is no principal songwriter. I guess you can do that if your band is a studio project. All these songs were written in that room together, and [we] discussed some things, and changing ideas. Anything one person had, someone else was there to lead us in another direction. I think we found a really good system for that and we stuck with that all the way through.
Has the rapid success affected you guys? You seem incredibly mild mannered and level headed so it’s great to hear that. Have you guys tried to stick to the ground as much as possible after all this?
Yeah. That’s the way we are as people. There’s no way any of that stuff would be changing us. Back home we don't consider ourselves to be successful just yet. We know that we are a band that sells, and it could happen for us, we've got a great chance. But it’s not a done deal, and we’re just working as hard as possible. It’s in our personalities. We’re Scottish people. We’re a humble nation.