Back in the same Glasgow room
Roses opens the sequence; Faith In Flying closes it. That is the shape of the 11-song track list Chvrches has announced for All The King’s Men. The fifth album by Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty arrives on January 22, 2027, following 2021’s Screen Violence. A useful place to begin understanding the change is the room in which the songs were made. Remote writing on the earlier album gives way to intensive periods spent working together in Glasgow.[1]
The band paused after its 2023 tour and returned for several three-week sessions. Cook was moving from electronica toward acoustic instruments, with Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and the Incredible String Band among his influences. The compositional interest lies in the simultaneous change of instruments and working method. Reaching for an acoustic instrument may open a different route into a song’s accompaniment; working in the same room may turn that choice into an arrangement question shared by the group.[1]
Alongside that choice sit Doherty’s returns to Scotland to spend time with his mother. Films by Ken Loach and British musicians willing to address social issues became sources of inspiration. After years in the United States, British and Scottish culture regained weight in the writing. Cook’s search for instruments and Doherty’s search for subject matter meet within the same project. I read the return as a choice about where a song begins: a place, a subject and a means of accompaniment.[1]
From the song to the stage
Listeners have more than one route into the album. Roses has been released, while Conman was performed earlier this year at London’s Royal Albert Hall during Robert Smith’s Teenage Cancer Trust concert series. Conman has not yet been officially released. One song has therefore reached listeners as a release, the other through a concert programme. The studio album and the live repertoire open the same forthcoming track list in different orders.[1]
The announced tour begins in Philadelphia on February 13 and reaches London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire on May 6. The album arrives before that journey. The sequence gives the band a concrete arrangement task: taking the songs developed in Glasgow into a live repertoire. An acoustic starting point and Chvrches’ identity as a three-person group are the two anchors of that transition. For me, the new period takes its shape there, with the same musicians choosing a different entrance into the song before carrying those songs back onto the stage.[1]