For a bit now, I’ve been wanting to do more Music Monday articles that aren’t just “Playlists of What I’ve Been Listening To Lately”, but wasn’t sure what. I started kicking around a deep dive into one of my favorite bands, CHVRCHES, but the piece wound up kind of long and I never quite finished it before getting distracted with other writing.
However! Last Friday, the group’s frontwoman Lauren Mayberry released her debut solo album, ‘Vicious Creature’. I’ll almost certainly write about ‘Vicious Creature’ at some point too, but I don’t quite work on that quick of a turn-around to have a review out yet; instead, I decided that would be a fun and topical reason to go back and finish the Chvrches idea. So, please join me as I look back at their discography so far, and how I would construct a Greatest Hits album for the group.
If you want to listen along as you read, here’s a YouTube link to my final playlist, and here’s a Spotify one.
I’ve mentioned several times over the years here at Out of Left Field that I’m a big fan of the band Chvrches. I instantly fell in love with their sound when I stumbled across their 'Recover' EP just over a decade ago and have been along for the ride ever since, through their first album (which released later in 2013), their three subsequent albums, dozens of singles and other releases, and multiples tours (several of which I’ve even been able to attend!). I’ve even gotten to highlight their music here at Out of Left Field multiple times, the most notable of which was probably when I featured their most recent album, 'Screen Violence', at the top of
my Summer 2021 Playlist.
Of course, the last major blurb I’ve written about them was over a year, as part of my
Summer 2023 Playlist. For those who maybe missed it, I noted that there were a lot of factors that maybe feel like the end of something for the band; they released a special 10th Anniversary Edition of that debut record, The Bones of What You Believe, at least two thirds of the group has started releasing has started releasing music for side projects (Iain Cook with his duo Protection, which made my
Start of 2023 Playlist with their debut EP, 'SEEDS I'*, and Lauren Mayberry as a solo artist, who made the
Summer 2023 Playlist and
its two follow-ups with new singles, although news of a full album remains stubbornly elusive^; I haven’t heard anything about if remaining member Martin Doherty is working on anything else), and their most recent new song (leaving aside the previously-unreleased tracks getting included on the Anniversary album) is a completely stand-alone single simply titled “Over”.
*Edit from Present Day Theo: While editing and polishing this, I learned that their EP ‘SEEDS II’ released late last year, and I just didn’t hear about it? I guess that’s going on the next playlist as well.
^Edit 2: As the new intro made clear, whatever studio roadblocks were delaying things here have been resolved, obviously.Granted, the band hasn’t announced a hiatus to pursue other projects, or anything official like that. In fact, Chvrches recently
signed new deals with record labels in the US and UK, leaving the label that had covered all of their releases up until now (I actually completely missed that news until I started researching this article!). So it maybe makes sense that there’s a bittersweet sense of moving on here; the band isn’t Over, but it definitely feels like the closing of one chapter in their story.
All of that kind of made me want to write something about them, some sort of retrospective on their first decade as a group, and when we’re talking about musicians, there’s a pretty natural vehicle for that: the Greatest Hits album. Or at least, that’s where my mind goes, since that was how I was introduced to a lot of older artists when I was growing up and learning about their past releases. I don’t really know how much of a demand there is for that these days, when most artists have their entire discographies on streaming services, and people are more inclined to pick out individual songs to try there rather than commit to an entire album.
Thankfully, though, I’m just one person using the concept of a “Greatest Hits” album to talk about a group that I love, rather than a marketing executive who actually has to sell the thing. And I do think that there’s at least some merit to the method of getting a curated walk through the best an artist has to offer, especially in the case of smaller acts where a casual listener might not know a dozen or more of their songs offhand.
But also, maybe there’s something to thinking about Greatest Hits in the context of modern music. There’s value in looking at the biggest hits of an artist’s career, the songs that resonated with the most people, and getting some sort of objective standard to build a look at their career. But also… if you’re a fan of a musician, I can almost
guarantee that there are things you disagree with when just ranking songs by how big of a hit they were, whether that’s deep cuts that never got to be singles, or singles that took off despite being black sheeps in the artist’s discography, or songs that just went underappreciated for whatever reason.
Since these types of compilation albums are basically just playlists, and those are so quick and easy to assemble these days, maybe there’s value in just making more personalized Best Of collections? It feels like a difficult line to walk, like it could easily overload people with too many options as everyone builds their own list.
But… as a companion to an article, it at least feels justified, I think. So if you’re new to CHVRCHES and want to get a taste, or if you’re a fan who wants an excuse to revisit another fan’s perspective on the highlights of their catalog, I’m hoping this piece serves as a good jumping off piece!