Chvrches – “Roses”

Chvrches have returned. In the time since the Glasgow indie pop veterans' last album, 2021's resounding return to form Screen Violence, Lauren Mayberry ventured out on her own, touring and releasing the solo debut album Vicious Creature in 2024. More recently, the band's Martin Doherty launched his own new project, the Leaving. In the meantime, Chvrches proper have kicked out new songs here and there plus a smattering of covers, including Postal Service and Robert Palmer tunes for this year's Hulu drama Tell Me Lies. They haven't gone away, but they've been in between-albums mode for a long time now.They seem to be back in album mode now. After debuting the new song "Con Man" onstage back in March, today the band has released "Roses," the first song in what has the looks of a rollout. In some senses, "Roses" sounds like the Chvrches we've always known, as would anything with Mayberry's voice on it. But it marks an interesting evolution for the trio. In the music's preference for guitars over synths, I hear echoes of the Cure, whose Robert Smith was Chvrches's friend and collaborator long before Olivia Rodrigo made him back into the zeitgeist. The chanted, dystopian chorus also reminds me of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall," a parallel I was not expecting from this bunch.A word from Mayberry:This is the longest break we had ever taken between albums and when we got together to write new music, we wanted to really push ourselves and not be retreading ground we'd walked before. I really think we achieved that. It feels like the most coherent vision we've had as a band. We're excited to be back…I don't know if this new era is more or less coherent than the identity they had on their debut, but I'm definitely intrigued to hear more. In the meantime, we can hear "Roses" below.