By her own account, Lauren Mayberry’s debut solo album has been a long time coming. She first mooted the idea of striking out on her own after the release of her band Chvrches’ third album, 2018’s Love Is Dead, when the trio were apparently in a state of disarray: instead, Covid happened, the band regrouped and made 2021’s Screen Violence remotely. But, she has suggested that its roots go back far further, to formative teenage pop loves that she felt impelled to deny in order to gain acceptance from male musicians more interested in “Fugazi B-sides”: “I bit my tongue to be one of the boys, I sold my soul to be one of the boys,” as she puts it on Sorry, Etc.
Vicious Creature takes a noticeably more straightforwardly pop tack than Chvrches’ trademark pile-up of distorted synthesisers, topped with a vocal style that Mayberry recently compared to a “sad robot”. In Mayberry’s telling, she always loved the kind of artists that Vicious Creature occasionally evokes, among them Fatboy Slim (the piano that appears at the start of Sunday Best has a distinct ring of Praise You about it), All Saints, whose influence looms large over opener Something in the Air and Avril Lavigne, who you could easily imagine singing the acoustic guitar-driven Anywhere But Dancing, with its memories of teenage discos and all that came with them (“downing all the gossip under neon lights … hands beneath a T-shirt on a Tuesday night”).
Its cast list involves a host of big names – not just Greg Kurstin, who worked on Love Is Dead, but Tobias Jesso Jr, who abandoned his own singer-songwriter career to work with Adele, Harry Styles and Dua Lipa; Shawn Mendes and Carly Rae Jepsen collaborator Ethan Gruska and Dan McDougall, who intriguingly balances drumming for Liam Gallagher with writing for Rag’n’Bone Man and Sam Ryder. In Mayberry’s telling, this isn’t the singer of a relatively leftfield band – admittedly one that released four Top 5 albums – lunging for mainstream success so much as a return to basics, “empowering myself to listen to my own intuition”.
For an album that features an artist in their late 30s harking back to their first musical loves, Vicious Creatures feels strangely timely: between the Eras tour, Brat summer and a Top 3 that Sabrina Carpenter seems to have annexed as her own personal fiefdom, it’s been proven beyond doubt that mainstream pop is the dominant cultural force in music again after rap’s dominance has lapsed; if the size and ardour of the crowd Lavigne drew at Glastonbury is anything to go by, no one these days feels obliged to hide their love of her. That said, the album’s best moments come when it slips the anchor of its influences and drifts off somewhere else. At its worst, the music on Vicious Creatures is melodically strong but has rounded edges: Crocodile Tears’ Kylie-esque Euro synths, the pleasant but USP-free A Work of Fiction. Far better are the songs where the inspiration is harder to place: Punch Drunk, driven by a snappy but lissom bass guitar line; the chaotic, fizzing drum’n’bass of Sorry, Etc. Mantra is probably the best track here precisely because it doesn’t sound like anything else, its big chorus wrapped in a wilfully disjointed arrangement that keeps lapsing into eerie silences.
Meanwhile, its lyrics veer between skilful – Oh, Mother’s fractured memories of a changing relationship with the titular parent – and heavy-handed: “God bless destruction of an ego / The condemnation of your pride,” as she sings on Sunday Best. Still, there’s something realistic – and again, of the moment – about their messy, contradictory emotions. Are You Awake? has Mayberry in her adopted home of Los Angeles, alternately pining for her Glasgow home and equivocal about going back: “Hometown hero is a poisoned chalice choice – if they all love you, you’re just destined to disappoint.” The depictions of toxic relationships – either personal or professional – always seem to implicate the first-person protagonist even as they’re pointing a finger. Change Shapes condemns music industry sexism, but suggests Mayberry has “learned the rules”: “We’re all snakes, but what’s a girl supposed to do?” A Work of Fiction’s male lead seems to be a posturing jerk, but, the song admits, that’s what makes him attractive. “It makes me sick,” she sings of one such relationship, on Punch Drunk, “and I hope it never ends.”
In fact, for all its ostensibly straightforward and zeitgeisty MO, Vicious Creatures is quite a messy, contradictory business overall: alternately clumsy and deft, a homage to pop’s past that’s at its best when it fixes its gaze firmly forward. For all the lengthy gestation period between Mayberry’s initial impulse to go solo and her solo debut’s arrival, the finished product still sounds like someone finding their feet in a different landscape.
• Vicious Creature is released 6 December
This week Alexis listened to
The New Starts – A Little Stone
As more than one observer has pointed out, if the New Starts were a band still wet behind the ears, rather than indie lifer Darren Hayman’s latest project, they’d be all over the tips for 2025 lists: this is a noisy, angular, thrilling rush.
