Joining us for an Audacy Check In today with host Kevan Kenney is Scottish synth-pop favorites CHVRCHES to give us details about their upcoming single, "Over," arriving on February 24 and more.
LISTEN NOW: Audacy Check In with CHVRCHES
CHVRCHES first teased something new was on the way earlier this month, and in a new clip featuring singer Lauren Mayberry mouthing along to a portion of the song shared on February 14, the trio describes the track as, "a brief reprieve from the horrors of CHV4 [their fourth album, 2021's Screen Violence]," adding, "we finished a new song and couldn’t wait to share it with you."
Just a few days out from the release, host Kevan says his preview of the track elicits a "Hotel California" kind of vibe to him, with the way the lyrical narrative opens up the song and immediately places the listener in a specific time and place. "That's quite a lofty comparison, wow, that's wonderful," singer Lauren Mayberry remarks. "I feel like we re-wrote the lyrics for this so many times, so I'm glad that you like them because we suffered deeply to get to this point. The feel and the sonics of this song felt like it wanted something more classic in that way, so it was nice to write more of a narrative-type thing than what we would normally do."
"I think I was making it too gloomy, maybe," Lauren admits of her back and forth process with the lyrics. "There's an iteration of it that's more in the 'Screen Violence' tone, sort of. Then we were talking about it and everyone's like, 'errr I don't know if we need to have a lyric in it about drinking bleach...' and I was like, 'but it's good, no? No?.' But I guess that's how it goes sometimes. Sometimes it'll happen really quickly and other times you have to re-work something a few times until you get the correct fit." Bandmate Martin Doherty remembers listening to the track in its early stages in his car and having the lyrics evoke "lots of pictures," he says, "tapping into emotions in a way that it hadn't before. I was in awe, like, 'she's really onto something here."
At the moment the new single will live as a stand-alone release, untied to any full-length offering. "We haven't done enough work to have it be," Mayberry laughs. "We've been touring so much," Doherty adds, "that was the thing. We were sitting on this song that we were all really excited about and then we were looking at a lot of touring and going, 'well, we could shelve this for another two years, or a year or who knows what. Or we could just be excited about it -- [producer] Oscar [Holter] was really excited about it, and when he turned in his revamped version, everybody had a bit of a moment, everyone got excited -- we thought, 'why the hell not? Let's just do it.'"
Looking specifically at the lyric "wake me up when it's over," which went through a number of wildly different ideations, Lauren says that "our hope is that a lot of people will be able to relate to that as a concept given where we're all at in the universe. It would be really nice to flip a switch and we could go back to thinking everything's fine and everything is great, but we know too much now."
WATCH NOW: Audacy Check In with CHVRCHES
CHVRCHES will be hitting the road with Coldplay for a number of dates on their 2023 Music Of The Spheres World Tour. Back when the band was first starting out, Doherty remembers some sage advice he received from frontman Chris Martin: "Don't sleep on your second album," Martin told him. "'Whatever you do just get in there and get a minute.' What he was saying was, you've got all this momentum, and if you strike fast, keep building that momentum, maybe you'll be here in 10 years. And look at us, here we are."
Don't miss our full Audacy Check In with CHVRCHES above, pre-save the new single now, and stay tuned for more conversations with your favorite artists right here on Audacy.
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