CHVRCHES

In little more than twelve months CHVRCHES have come out of nowhere to be everywhere. There’s a lot to catch up on since they posted their first song, Lies, online last May – a place in the top five of the BBC Sound of 2013, sell out headline tours in the UK and US (the most recent US tour playing to almost 20,000 people over 18 shows), a triumphant, award-winning appearance at SXSW and a string of stadium dates with Depeche Mode, to name but a few.

The excitement around that debut track was enhanced by the fact that there wasn’t so much as a photo of the band online. Who was that facelessly contorting the legacy of electronic music into surprisingly palatable new shapes? Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty weren’t being deliberately coy – they were just hard at work capturing a sound that, in the tradition of all great musical alchemies, even surprised the band that made it.

Lies was followed in the summer by The Mother We Share – a euphoric, expertly-crafted piece of synthpop with a warm emotional centre that captured the imagination of a million listeners and saw the band step out from the shadows to put faces to the names. Both tracks, alongside bona fide singles Recover and Gun, feature on CHVRCHES’ longed-for debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, out now.