Chvrches have shared their first new music in two years – listen to brand new single ‘He Said She Said’ below.
The Scottish pop trio have been teasing the new track for the past week, sharing a series of cryptic posts with messages such as: “It’s all in your head.”
Vocalist Lauren Mayberry said in a statement that the new track was borne out of thinking and reflecting during the coronavirus lockdown and “examining experiences I had previously glossed over or deeply buried.”
She said: “I feel like I have spent a lot of my life (personally and professionally) performing the uncomfortable balancing act that is expected of women and it gets more confusing and exhausting the older I get.
“Be successful but only in the way we want you to be. Speak up for yourself but not so loudly that you steal men’s thunder. Be attractive but only for the benefit of men, and certainly don’t be vain. Strive to be The Hot Sad Girl but don’t actually be sad in a way that’s inconvenient for anyone. Be smart but not smart enough to ask for more than what you’re being given.”
Listen to ‘He Said She Said’ below:
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Speaking on the new song, Mayberry continued: “‘He Said She Said’ is my way of reckoning with things I’ve accepted that I know I shouldn’t have. Things I pretended weren’t damaging to me. It was the first song we wrote when we started back up, and the opening line (“He said, you bore me to death”) was the first lyric that came out.
“All the verse lines are tongue-in-cheek or paraphrased versions of things that have actually been said to me by men in my life. Being a woman is fucking exhausting and it felt better to scream it into a pop song than scream it into the void. After the past year, I think we can all relate to feeling like we’re losing our minds.”
Chvrches’ new material follows the band’s last full length album, 2018’s ‘Love Is Dead’. Since then, the band have shared two new singles before now – 2019’s ‘Here With Me’, their collaboration with Marshmello, and ‘Death Stranding’, taken from the soundtrack for video game Death Stranding: Timefall.
In a recent interview, Mayberry teased what to expect from the trio’s next record, saying the record has “definitely got the Chvrches DNA” but that the songs featured on it couldn’t “slot into any of the first three records”.