Chvrches Say Their Fifth Album Is Ninety Per Cent Done

Five years after Screen Violence, Chvrches have put a number on the next record. In a February 2026 interview the band said the fifth album was ninety per cent complete, that it would surprise their audience, and that it might rip some faces off.

That is a specific claim from a group whose reputation rests on clean, precise, extremely well-behaved synth-pop, and it is the most interesting thing they have said in years.

They Came Back Through a Television Drama

The return did not arrive as a single. In January 2026 they released a cover of Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love for the third season of Hulu’s Tell Me Lies, and on 17 February they followed it with The Postal Service’s Such Great Heights, used in the series finale.

Coming back via a sync is an unusual choice and a shrewd one. A cover carries no expectations about a band’s next direction, it reaches an audience watching for other reasons, and it lets a group that has been quiet for years be heard without announcing anything. Two covers in six weeks is a soft launch.

The song choices are not accidental either. Such Great Heights is a 2003 electronic-pop record by a side project of Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, which is close to the exact lineage Chvrches came out of. Addicted to Love is the opposite: a 1986 rock single best known for a video about mannequins, which is the sort of thing a band covers when they want to be funny about image.

The Gap Was Not a Split

Lauren Mayberry announced solo music in July 2023, in a statement that went out of its way to close off the obvious interpretation. She said she met Iain Cook and Martin Doherty when she was twenty-three, described herself then as a little baby of a person in hindsight, and added that she was proud of the band’s chapters and grateful to her bandmates.

The load-bearing sentence was that they were all confident the Chvrches story had many more pages yet to be written. She also described her own state at the time as excited, terrified and bewildered, which is a more candid summary of starting a solo career than most artists offer.

The first solo run was small rooms: 9:30 Club in Washington, the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, the Troubadour in Los Angeles, then Oran Mor in Glasgow, Scala in London and a European leg through Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Madrid. Those are venues a fraction of the size Chvrches play, which is the point of doing it.

Vicious Creature followed on Island in December 2024, described as more pop-oriented than the band and more personal. She toured it heavily through 2025, which is why the Chvrches gap ran as long as it did and why nobody in the band has treated the delay as something needing an apology.

Where They Started

Cook and Doherty met in 2003 at the University of Strathclyde. Cook’s previous band, Aereogramme, disbanded in 2007, and the pair reconnected in 2011 to start an electronic project. Mayberry, then in Blue Sky Archives, was brought in for backing vocals and became the frontwoman.

The name is spelled with a V rather than a U for a purely practical reason: to stop search engines returning actual churches. That is a very 2011 problem to have solved, and it says something about a band who have always been careful about the mechanics of being found.

Four Albums and a Robert Smith

The Bones of What You Believe arrived on 23 September 2013 through Virgin and Glassnote and scored 80 on Metacritic. Every Open Eye followed exactly two years later. Love Is Dead, produced by Greg Kurstin across Los Angeles, New York and London, came in May 2018 with Matt Berninger of The National guesting.

Screen Violence, begun in February 2020 and released in August 2021, featured Robert Smith on How Not to Drown, which won Best Song by a UK Artist at the NME Awards. Consequence named them band of the year for 2021.

Their influences read as a straight line through British electronic pop: Depeche Mode, New Order, the Cure, Eurythmics, Kate Bush, Brian Eno. Wired once called them the heir apparent to that tradition, which is a heavy thing to put on a band two albums in and, on the evidence, roughly right.

The Division of Labour

The credits explain why the band could pause without dissolving. Cook plays synthesizers, piano, guitars and bass; Doherty plays synthesizers, samplers, piano, guitars and bass and sings lead on some tracks; Mayberry sings, plays drums, percussion and additional synthesizers. Jonny Scott has handled live drums since 2018.

That is three people who can each build a record on their own, which is unusual and structurally important. A band where the singer cannot produce and the producers cannot sing has to keep working or stop entirely. One where everybody covers most of the ground can afford two years apart, because nothing atrophies in the meantime.

It also explains the long gaps between albums even before the hiatus: 2013, 2015, 2018, 2021. The spacing widened steadily, which is what happens when three people with full production skills each want a say in every decision.

Anniversaries and a Video Game

The quiet years were not empty. A tenth-anniversary edition of The Bones of What You Believe appeared in October 2023 with four previously unreleased tracks including Manhattan, and Every Open Eye got the same treatment for Record Store Day in April 2025.

They also appear as characters in Death Stranding 2, working at an animal shelter in Australia, having previously written a song for the first game. Confirming the fifth album at that game’s launch event in July 2025 is a fittingly oblique way for this band to break news.

What Ninety Per Cent Means

The label position changed in 2022, when they left Glassnote after nearly a decade and signed with Island and EMI. A fifth album will be their first full record under that deal, which raises the stakes on whatever the surprise turns out to be.

A band promising to rip faces off is usually promising guitars, tempo or volume. From a group who have spent four albums refining a very controlled sound, and whose singer has just spent two years making something poppier and more personal on her own, it more likely means the reverse: that the restraint is coming off.

It is the same position Ladytron reached by simply continuing at their own pace for twenty-five years. A synth-pop band that survives past a decade stops having anything to prove about its sound, and the only interesting question left is what it does with that freedom.

There is also a practical argument for the timing. The band that broke in 2013 did so into a landscape where their kind of bright, sharply produced electronic pop was unusual on the radio. It is now the default sound of the charts, largely because of records like theirs. Returning with something that deliberately breaks from it is the only move that does not read as arriving late to a party they started.