This is definitely a no-duh, but if Chvrches frontwoman Lauren Mayberry invites you to a party she's throwing, you should drop everything—previous engagements be damned—because it'll probably have a Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme.
"Myself and Iain [Cook] are big Buffy dorks," Mayberry says on the phone from New York, one of the first stops on the band's North American tour. "For a long time I wanted to have a Bronze scene house party, but I feel like maybe the moment's gone and people won't get it now."
TV shows aside, the honey-voiced Scottish singer has great taste on all fronts—especially in her work on Chvrches, Mayberry's team-up with multi-instrumentalists Cook and Martin Doherty. The Glasgow trio makes melancholy-tinged postcards to electronic and dream-pop's past, welcoming comparisons to Depeche Mode, New Order, and the fellow Scots of Cocteau Twins. It's good company to be in, but more than just a look in the rearview, Chvrches is the stuff of now—'80s-esque synth-pop done up with millennial style. Their music is cinematic, slick, and much smarter than its deceptively catchy outer shell suggests.
The band's second album, Every Open Eye, came out in September, and it's an even better creation than The Bones of What You Believe, their 2013 debut that materialized out of nowhere and lit up the globe. "When we started on what eventually became the first album, we weren't a full-time band. We hadn't really done any live shows. We all had other jobs. It was more of a fact-finding mission," Mayberry says of Bones.
