12/18 CHVRCHES - Deliverance @ The Anthem, Washington, DC 10/18/18

Truth exists somewhere between the dark and the light It’s that quest for balance that runs throughout Love Is Dead. Lead single “Get Out” is a sprawling crescendo of heartbroken joy, and the album’s opening track, “Graffiti,” with it’s lilting syncopated backbeat follows suit. “Wrote our names along the bathroom walls, graffiti-ing our hearts across the stalls,” Lauren sings. “I’ve been waiting for my whole life to grow old and now we never will.” The song captures a sense of perspective on the passage of time. “Growing up and realizing things aren’t going to be the way you thought they would be,” the singer explains. “The feeling of Stand By Me, ‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, did you?’” Then there’s the slinky “Deliverance,” which personifies that classic CHVRCHES blend of punk ethos with a pure pop sound. “You don’t hear people singing on the radio about the hypocrisy of religion,” says Iain, “but that’s what’s exciting about it. We were thinking about Like a Prayer era Madonna, and Nick Cave, and Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion.” The band doesn’t consider their music expressly political, per se, but the urgent, brightly haunted “Graves,” with lyrics like “they’re leaving bodies in stairwells and washing up on the shore/you can look away while they’re dancing on our graves/if you don’t have a heart I can offer you mine,” feels abject and despairing yet joyful in a decidedly topical way. And on, “Miracle,” Mayberry questions “I feel like but I’m falling but I’m trying to fly, where does all the good go?” Speaking of politics, the dreamy “Heaven/Hell,” with lyrics like, “Is it right if I’m a perfect actress/Playing the princess in distress?/Is it alright if I save myself and/If I clean up my own mess?/Is it enough yet, ‘cause I’ve had enough?” gets at an issue CHVRCHES have been dealing with since their very first Twitter follower: what it’s like to be a rock band with a female frontperson. From the jump, Lauren has been outspoken about the vitriolic sexism and misogyny she was expected to tolerate merely because she’s a female human being singing on a stage. Hers is a perspective that has found much greater support in this last year, which is great, obviously. “I think it’s healthy that it’s in the mainstream,” Martin says, “of course, but she was getting fucking slaughtered five years ago, for saying stuff that’s now everywhere I look. Lauren stood up against this kind of behavior on day one.” And she paid a price. Unlike her bandmates, who, by the time CHVRCHES formed, had already logged a lot of years in other groups, Lauren’s entrée to the rock and roll life was more trial by fire. “I was 23 when I met Iain, 24 when we started this band and I’m thirty now,” she recalls. “I’ve had to grow up in front of people.” From the very beginning, “there was a lot of trepidation on my part,” she recalls. “As a woman in any industry but especially as a woman in the entertainment industry, I knew how people talk about you. How they perceive you. Even before the first record came out I could see all these monsters in the trees already. Some of those monsters turned out to be real. Some of them did not. That’s a lot of what Love Is Dead is about: growing up, “coming to terms with the fact that there are great things in the world and there are awful things in the world and that you can’t get one without the other,” Lauren says. It’s that duality, again. “We’re fucked, the world is fucked,” Iain summarizes, with a smile. “But there’s an ellipses at the end. It’s Love Is Dead…. Like, how did we get to this point? And how do we move on from this point? It’s Love Is Dead, we’re fucked, what’s next?”