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”).
