Nearly six years after “Screen Violence,” CHVRCHES are returning with a fifth album shaped by a deliberate break, separate projects and a determination not to repeat their first decade.
CHVRCHES spent their first decade moving quickly.
The Glasgow-formed trio released four albums between 2013 and 2021, building a recognizable sound around synthesizers, large pop melodies and Lauren Mayberry’s clear, emotionally direct vocals. There was extensive touring between them, taking a band that emerged from Glasgow’s independent music scene onto festival stages and increasingly large international venues.
Then they stopped.
All The King’s Men, due Jan. 22, 2027 via Futures Music Group, will be CHVRCHES’ first album since Screen Violence in 2021. The 11-track record follows “Roses,” released in September as the band’s first new song in three years, and will be followed by an extensive 2027 tour across North America, the UK and Ireland.
The nearly six-year interval between albums is easily the longest of the band’s career. But it would be misleading to describe it as six years spent struggling to make another CHVRCHES record.
The trio were still touring Screen Violence into 2023. What followed was a deliberate pause.
Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty had spent roughly a decade moving through four albums and their accompanying tours. Mayberry and Cook wanted time for other projects. Doherty later acknowledged that he found the prospect more difficult than his bandmates did.
“We’d been on the road for 10 years after making four records, bang-bang-bang-bang,” he told NME earlier this year, recalling the period before the hiatus.
When the others said they wanted to do something different for a while, Doherty said he felt “completely lost.” CHVRCHES had absorbed so much of his time and identity that its sudden absence left him facing an unfamiliar amount of uncertainty.
But he made another point equally clear.
The band had not split up.
Four albums without much room to stop
CHVRCHES arrived in the early 2010s as electronic pop was moving freely between independent music and the mainstream.
Their 2013 debut, The Bones of What You Believe, established much of the vocabulary that would follow: bright and sometimes abrasive synthesizers, precise pop structures and lyrics that could be considerably darker than the production surrounding them.
Every Open Eye followed in 2015. Love Is Dead arrived in 2018, and Screen Violence in 2021.
The sound changed along the way. So did the scale around the band.
By the time of Love Is Dead, CHVRCHES had spent years inside a demanding record-and-tour cycle. Mayberry has previously spoken about reaching a point after that period when she needed distance from the band and the machinery around it.
Then came another disruption.
Work on Screen Violence began shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic separated the members geographically. Cook was in Glasgow while Mayberry and Doherty were in Los Angeles, forcing much of the record to be developed remotely.
The circumstances unexpectedly fitted an album concerned with isolation, fear, digital life and violence mediated through screens. But they also meant CHVRCHES had made a record without the normal experience of three musicians occupying the same room for much of the process.
They eventually returned to the road.
When that touring cycle finished in 2023, another immediate album was not the priority.
This time, stopping was the plan.
What happened while CHVRCHES was away
Mayberry’s solo career became the most visible product of the break.
Her debut solo album, Vicious Creatures, arrived in December 2024. Working under her own name gave her space to make music without every decision being interpreted through the established sound of CHVRCHES.
Cook had already started another project, Protection, with Scott Paterson, formerly of Sons and Daughters.
Doherty eventually found his own route outside the band. Together with CHVRCHES touring drummer Jonny Scott, he formed The Leaving, a project drawing more directly on rave and electronic club music. Their debut album, Ultimate Buzz, arrived in 2026.
Doherty’s account of the hiatus makes clear that this period was not equally comfortable for all three members.
He has described CHVRCHES as having become deeply connected to his sense of identity. The break forced him to work without the certainty that had structured much of the previous decade.
That does not make All The King’s Men a reunion album in the conventional sense. There was no announced breakup to reverse.
Instead, the three members returned after having spent meaningful time making music outside the group.
That distinction matters because they have also been unusually explicit about what they did not want from the fifth album: repetition.
Doherty told NME that there was little point in making a fifth record that simply sounded like the first. Mayberry, when “Roses” was released, similarly said the band wanted to push itself rather than walk over familiar ground.
Back in Glasgow, and back in the same room
The process behind All The King’s Men immediately separates it from Screen Violence.
CHVRCHES returned to Glasgow and worked through multiple concentrated recording periods of roughly three weeks at a time.
The geographical return was accompanied by a different set of influences.
Cook, who remained based in Scotland, began moving away from electronics in his initial writing and toward acoustic instruments. Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and the Incredible String Band were among the artists cited around his approach to the record.
Doherty had been making frequent trips back to Scotland and immersed himself in British film and music, including the work of filmmakers Ken Loach and Shane Meadows and musicians such as Massive Attack, Siouxsie and the Banshees and PJ Harvey.
The album has consequently been presented as an exploration of British and Scottish culture and history, viewed partly through the perspective of musicians who have spent substantial time living in the United States.
Mayberry also returned from a different creative position. After making a solo album, the new CHVRCHES sessions placed renewed emphasis on storytelling and on using more of her vocal range.
These are documented changes in process and reference points. They are not yet evidence that CHVRCHES have completely reinvented their sound.
The album has not been released.
“Roses,” however, provides an early indication that the trio were serious about not simply reproducing an earlier version of themselves.
The single is darker and harder-edged than much of the band’s most accessible synth-pop, with industrial textures supporting lyrics that address idealized versions of Britain’s past. Another new song, “Conman,” which CHVRCHES performed live earlier this year, has similarly pointed toward a more abrasive side of the new material.
Two songs are not enough to define an 11-track album.
They are enough to show that the band’s return is not being presented as a nostalgia exercise.
The question of CHVRCHES’ DNA
That creates an obvious tension around All The King’s Men.
How much can CHVRCHES change before the qualities that made the band recognizable begin to disappear?
Doherty has already offered his answer.
Earlier this year, while the album was still being completed, he described it as the most “fearless” record CHVRCHES had made. He said it was harder and likely to surprise listeners, but added that it would not become unrecognizable.
“It’s still the same people and DNA,” he told NME.
That claim cannot be independently tested until the album is heard in full. But it identifies the balance the band itself appears to be pursuing.
CHVRCHES have never depended on synthesizers alone for their identity. From The Bones of What You Believe onward, much of their music has relied on contrast: large, accessible melodies against anxiety, anger, vulnerability and darker subject matter.
That tension survived considerable production changes across their first four albums.
Screen Violence was already evidence of that flexibility. Guitars and darker textures became more prominent, horror-film imagery provided a conceptual framework, and Robert Smith appeared on “How Not to Drown.” It did not sound identical to the band’s debut, but its emotional contrasts remained familiar.
The early material from All The King’s Men suggests CHVRCHES are testing those boundaries again.
This time the context is different. British and Scottish identity are more explicitly present. Cook has brought acoustic songwriting into the early stages of the process. Mayberry has made a record outside the band. Doherty has experienced both the uncertainty of losing CHVRCHES as his daily structure and the freedom of making music elsewhere.
The important change, then, may not be that the band’s original identity has been discarded.
It is that the three people returning to CHVRCHES are no longer in exactly the same creative positions they occupied when they left it.
A return without pretending nothing happened
It is too early to call All The King’s Men a reinvention.
Only part of the album is public, and descriptions supplied by the band and its representatives cannot substitute for hearing the finished record.
What can be established is that the circumstances around CHVRCHES have changed substantially since Screen Violence.
The members spent time working independently. The fifth album was made together in Glasgow rather than across the geographical separation imposed on its predecessor. Its stated influences reach into British folk, post-punk, trip-hop, independent film and acoustic songwriting alongside the electronic music with which CHVRCHES remain closely associated.
And the band itself is openly rejecting the idea that returning requires repeating its past.
Whether All The King’s Men can absorb all of those changes without losing the tension that has defined CHVRCHES will only become clear when the full album arrives in January.
For now, the available evidence supports something more modest.
CHVRCHES did not spend six years trying to recreate the band they had been. They finished one cycle, stepped away from it, made music elsewhere and eventually returned with a record deliberately designed to test what CHVRCHES could still contain.
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