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Chvrches - Screen Violence

This fourth album from the Scottish synthpop trio appears just in time to mark 10 years since they formed in Glasgow. The band experimented with pop influences on 2018’s Love Is Dead, prompting mixed reviews, and while they garnered chart success in a collaboration with Marshmello for single Here With Me, the band have moved away from pure pop to return to the clean and slightly darker sounds familiar to longer-term fans.

Production duties have been brought fully in-house again, with the influence of Iain Cook and Martin Doherty apparent.

Opener Asking For A Friend sounds achingly familiar and it is not until the fourth track, Violent Delights, that they depart from the ever-present grinding bass drum, with a wider chorus and contrast for Lauren Mayberry’s bell-like vocals.

There are other highlights: second single How Not To Drown, which features a duet with The Cure’s Robert Smith, mellows into a trance-like finish after five minutes, while Final Girl, referring to the horror film trope, builds on the influences picked up while working with

Halloween director

John Carpenter.

Nightmares, the penultimate song, shares a title with a cinematic track from Iain

Cook’s former act Aere- ogramme, and fully utilises his production influences alongside Doherty’s sonic talents honed with post-puck act The Twilight Sad.

Conversely, final track Better If You Don’t is the true oddball – a sweet synth-free ballad.

But overall Screen Violence feels like a return to form: a release that sees the band being themselves once again.