Music review: Chvrches, SWG3, Glasgow

Chvrches, SWG3, Glasgow ***

“We wrote a really cheerful record during lockdown,” joked Chvrches frontwoman Lauren Mayberry. That record is the Glasgow trio’s fourth album, Screen Violence, a pop interrogation of horror movie tropes and other insidious misogyny set to an anthemic synthquake soundtrack which evokes video nasty culture, only with a bigger budget and more mainstream appeal.

In collaboration with Assai Records, the band made their belated live launch with this relatively intimate show which nevertheless threw everything bar the huge LED screen at their first opportunity to share the new material with a hometown audience.

The John Carpenter-esque strains of their eerie analogue synth intro was a good match for the retro electric pop rock sound which followed. With Iain Cook and Martin Doherty stationed behind their keyboards and drummer Jonny Scott poised to bring the arena heft, Mayberry took the stage, arms aloft like a pop prizefighter in her playful power-dressing puffy sleeves, and launched straight into He Said She Said, a song about the control and manipulation of public image, sweetly sung from bitter experience.

Overall, this was a surround sound experience with sweeping synthesizers, powerhouse drumming, mighty bursts of shimmering guitar and Mayberry’s trebly voice and the stronger melodies cutting through above the pomp, while a swirling phalanx of spotlights confirmed that this is a show destined for bigger halls.

Debut single The Mother We Share and Bury It, from second album Every Open Eye, remain among their catchiest and chunkiest numbers. Of the new material, the 80s tech funk-influenced Final Girl made its mark with Mayberry using the horror film convention of the last girl standing to reflect on her time in the spotlight. She returned for the encore elbow deep in fake blood, looking like an extra in Carrie who has beaten back all comers.

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