Music Monday: CHVRCHES: Building a Greatest Hits

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.

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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!

Music Monday: Summer 2024 Playlist

(Yes, this article is going up a little late, but I decided I’d rather get it posted during Labor Day week rather than wait another full week since Bandcamp Friday is this week, plus I still wanted to keep the “Music Monday” name.)

I’m not going to lie, the last few playlists articles have been exhausting, between their large scale and heaps of writing. I like doing them, sharing music and talking about it is a lot of fun, but I had kind of been considering scaling them back in some way to make it a little easier on myself; I started working on the last one something like a month ahead of my self-imposed deadline, and still barely got it done in time.

Thankfully, when I started working on this one (a little closer to the deadline), I realized that I also just had less to talk about this time. I was a little lighter on music discovery the last few months, between being busy with other things, the lack of Bandcamp Fridays spurring me to scour for new things, and just several other factors. Things might pick up again for the next edition (September 6th marks the first Bandcamp Friday since May for anyone interested in picking up things I’ve mentioned here before, and I definitely built up my own list to investigate before then; plus at a certain point, I’m sure End of Year lists will release and give me new things to check out), but we’ll see how I’m feeling come four months from now or so.

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But I did find things that I liked and wanted to talk about in the meantime, including some of my favorite releases of the year, so completely skipping a playlist was never part of the question. Like I’ve said before, I use these as much as scrapbooks for myself as anything, and missing any of them feels weird (I still idly consider going back and making playlists for the years I skipped sometimes).

So, without further ado, my Summer 2024 Playlist:






Notes: Not every song was on every platform. Plasma Cutter’s album wasn’t on YouTube (Bandcamp), alpha’s music was not on either YouTube or Spotify (Bandcamp), and sponzi’s “reach” is basically nowhere (Soundcloud).


On that note, I’ll reiterate that if you want to support these artists, Bandcamp is the best place to do it! Most of them have Bandcamp pages where you can purchase the music directly and which will give artists much better cuts than any other platform; and, as I mentioned above, this Friday (September 6th) is Bandcamp Friday, so 100% of any purchases on that day will go to the artists!


And much like the last Playlist article, I know album titles are usually italicized, but I used single quotation marks here instead because Blogger has been making fixing formatting very tough, and using single quotes means exponentially less work when I go to post.

Music Monday: Start of 2024 Playlist (Tenth Anniversary Edition!!)

Just in the nick of time, we have a Music Monday update with my second playlist of 2024! This is another big one (covering my listening from January through roughly the first week of May, although this is mostly just for my sake; I'm not super timely, and mostly just check stuff out when I get around to it), but I had fun discovering some new music and then writing about it.


And this is a big playlist in multiple ways: next week (June 7th) is also the tenth Anniversary of Out of Left Field! I doubt I’ll have time to put together another big piece, so you can think of this one as the Big Anniversary Post for the occasion.


As usual, here are the links to the Spotify and YouTube Playlists, each in roughly-article order:

Notes: The same songs are missing on both playlists, so I’ll just link to those Bandcamps. You can find 7mai’s tracks here, alpha’s here and here (or their Soundcloud), Prom Nite’s here, and Lauryl Sulfate’s here. Also, in case any of my former English teachers are reading this, I know album titles are usually italicized, but I used single quotation marks here because Blogger has been making fixing formatting very tough, and I’d like to minimize that.

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As always, you can read a full copy of the playlist at the end of the article. And remember, a lot of these artists (especially the smaller ones) can be found on Bandcamp, if you want to support them!



The Best Stuff:

Good Kid: I'm not really sure how to describe their style? Every description I could find just leaves it at "indie rock", which feels overly broad. The closest thing I can think of is j-rock, but I feel a little weird calling a Canadian band that performs exclusively in English "Japanese rock", even if that is clearly is one of their major influences. But sound-wise, that probably is the closest fit. Although now that I think about it, I guess it is kind of weird that there aren't more English-language takes on that style. Either way, I enjoy it a lot, and ended up including songs from all four of their self-titled EPs here. The most recent one released back in March and has probably my favorite two songs of theirs, the frantic and frenetic “Break” and a high-energy cover of Laufey’s “From the Start”; limiting myself to just two selections per record was tough, but even with the high baseline, these two stood out as easy picks.


Bad Moves: I checked this DC-band out because I saw them compared to The New Pornographers somewhere. Not sure I would have made that comparison, but I do see it; they have a similar sort of power pop style, but with a higher energy and a little more stripped-down/straightforward? I started with their debut album ‘Tell No One’ and very quickly moved on to their follow-up ‘Untenable’. Picking songs from them was difficult; I could have really gone with any combination here and been happy, there really isn’t a clunker here, and any time I put it on, time just seems to start flying. It’s apparently been nearly four years since ‘Untenable’, and they finally released new singles in December and April, so I’m hoping for Album 3 soon!