Review: Chvrches’s Screen Violence Transforms Hopelessness Into Inspiration

Chvrches’s fourth album, Screen Violence, is imbued with a more overt sense of political purpose, but it’s also abundant in hooks.

Chvrches, Screen Violence
Photo: Sebastian Mlynarski & Kevin J Thomson

Chvrches enchants seemingly by brute force, their maximalist synth-pop sound, honed by Iain Cook and Martin Doherty, luxuriating in every conceivable bell and whistle and embellishing singer Lauren Mayberry’s youthful but increasingly confident voice. The Scottish trio’s songs are emotionally lofty, with Mayberry weaving interpersonal power struggles with apocalyptic visions. As such, the group has typically dealt in abstractions: sweeping landscapes, concepts, and symbols, and big, barely containable feelings.

Chvrches’s latest, Screen Violence, is imbued with a more overt sense of political purpose than their prior three albums, but it’s no less abundant in hooks. In the past, the trio have painted their themes with a broad brush. On 2018’s Love Is Dead, they enlisted prolific pop producer Greg Kurstin to assemble a mix of true-to-form bangers (“Forever”) and potential radio singles (“Miracle”) with uneven results. Despite its gloomy title, that album rarely recaptures the sardonic and often menacing lyricism of 2013’s The Bones of What You Believe.

Screen Violence, in contrast, lives up to its title’s promise of anguish and suspicion of the Hollywood machine. A clear standout is “Violent Delights,” whose tortured, towering chorus and imagery of drowning and death are exhilaratingly evocative of pop-punk. Maybe killing as an Aristotelian conduit to catharsis was employed to subtler effect on 2013’s playful “Gun,” but Mayberry positioning herself as a would-be tragic hero fits with her thinly veiled exhaustion with the entertainment industry.

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On the similarly explosive “How Not to Drown,” Mayberry rhymes “drown” with “crown,” equating success with self-destruction. When the Cure’s Robert Smith, who makes a guest appearance on the track, then dejectedly invokes an all-powerful “they”—an entire society out for “blood” and “guts”—the song stumbles in its generalities.

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Still, the gore builds neatly into the visual world of “Final Girl,” whose slasher-inspired lyrics about resisting the pressures women experience in the music business are some of the album’s most concrete: “It feels like the weight is too much to carry/I should quit, maybe go get married.” When the sound of glass shattering pierces the song’s outro, it links to another track, “California,” where Mayberry sings, “Pull me into the screen at the end,” submitting herself to the media vortex. The sound effect also conjures the image of Mayberry, the final girl, smashing through a TV screen, escaping the cycle of torture many others have not.

The final girl trope is further unspooled on “Good Girls,” on which Mayberry insists that she’ll survive despite not fitting prescribed notions of how women should be. The horror genre has come a long way since virginity was a prerequisite for women’s survival, but the song’s aching melody illuminates Mayberry’s condemnation of purity culture.

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Still, the nightmare of media and culture that she seeks to escape isn’t just one of retro misogynistic voyeurism—of a killer stalking unsuspecting sorority sisters. Rather, the titular screen also refers to the news. “Televise the great disaster,” Mayberry sings on “Lullabies,” describing herself as “paralyzed and spinning backwards.” The uncomfortable connection between fact and fiction, between real human suffering and the vulturous consumption of violent content, evokes the bleakness of our moment without excusing apathy.

If Chvrches’s prior albums used Cook and Doherty’s robust, detailed production to blow up feelings to 10 times their size, Screen Violence matches the urgency of its sound with the weight of its content. The hypnagogic glimmer of “Asking for a Friend” and balancing of Hi-NRG intensity with gothic melodrama on “Nightmares” befit the songs’ reflections on mortality. Even the album’s fuzzy, upbeat closing track, “Better If You Don’t,” grimly ruminates on regret. Four albums in, Chvrches have honed their pop craft and, by extension, their ability to transform hopelessness into inspiration.

Score: 
 Label: Glassnote  Release Date: August 27, 2021  Buy: Amazon

Eric Mason

Eric Mason studied English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where literature and creative writing classes deepened his appreciation for lyrics as a form of poetry. He has written and edited for literary and academic journals, and when he’s not listening to as many new albums as possible, he enjoys visiting theme parks and rewatching Schitt’s Creek.

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