Chvrches Stake Nearly Six Years on Indie Rock

Chvrches will release All The King’s Men on January 22, 2027, their first album since 2021 and a turn into indie rock after nearly six years away. Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty cut 11 songs in Glasgow, then booked a theater tour that opens February 13 in Philadelphia and closes May 6 in London.

The Scottish trio announced the record and the routing on October 21 through Futures Music Group, the indie label that issued the lead single in September. They are not bringing back the synth-pop machine that put four albums on the Billboard 200. They are betting the comeback on guitars, British writing and rooms that fit a reset.

Nick Drake, Ken Loach and a Glasgow Studio

The band’s own account of the record is blunt. All The King’s Men is a self-consciously British set of indie rock that, they say, fans will not expect, and that they did not expect either. Cook still lives in Scotland and had started to put electronics down. Doherty had been flying home to see his mother and sitting with British films and British records that stare at the country’s harder edges. Mayberry arrived from years of sessions, looking for stories and a wider vocal range.

HOW THE THREE BROKE THE OLD METHOD

• Iain Cook: He turned to acoustic instruments and to Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and Incredible String Band.
• Martin Doherty: He brought Ken Loach and Shane Meadows, then Massive Attack, Siouxsie and the Banshees and PJ Harvey.
• Lauren Mayberry: She wanted a sharper storytelling voice after what the band called her 10,000 hours of sessions away from the group.

Those inputs land on one 11-song sequence. “Adore You” is framed as playful 90s pop-rock. “Comedown Tomorrow” is framed as a bleak, wide-open ballad. The through line, in the band’s words, is British and Scottish culture seen by a group that had spent years in the United States and come back finding the UK “old and real,” even when it is ugly.

ALL THE KING’S MEN TRACKLIST

1. Roses
2. Evil
3. Adore You
4. Overthinker
5. Royal Blue
6. Comedown Tomorrow
7. Friend of a Friend
8. Three Out of Five
9. Conman
10. Jamie’s Prayer
11. Faith in Flying

Jonny Scott, the drummer who has long sat in Chvrches’ live pocket, is credited as a writer on “Roses” and, Doherty has said, played on the whole record. The bet has a fourth pair of hands on it.

What “Roses” Sounds Like After the Gap

“Roses” arrived on September 22, 2026, as BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record, the first Chvrches single in three years after 2023’s “Over.” You can stream the single Roses now. Spike Stent mixed it. Randy Merrill mastered it. The opening “synth” is not a synth. Mayberry said it is a vocal sample run through an OP-1 keyboard, and that the sketch of the melody and the structure landed in the first afternoon.

The first lyric she kept for the album sits in the spoken bridge: “A woman is a woman even if you want her dead.” Later she snarls, “raise a glass to delusions of the good days of blood and wine; of pearls for swine.” The song ends on a spoken command: “If I may command your undivided attention, now we can start.”

The clip shows her in a darker cut, in front of a crashed car and a suit of armour. Some ears will still hear the old Chvrches attack in the chorus; the press copy calls the album indie rock, and the single is the test of how far that claim goes. Doherty already tried to hold both ideas at once. In February he called the record the most fearless thing they have made, “quite hard, but not to the point where you won’t recognise the band.” Same people, he said. Same DNA.

This is the longest break we had ever taken between albums and when we got together to write new music, we wanted to really push ourselves and not be retreading ground we’d walked before. I really think we achieved that. It feels like the most coherent vision we’ve had as a band. We’re excited to be back.

Lauren Mayberry, Chvrches

They previewed another new song, “Conman,” in March 2026 at Robert Smith’s Teenage Cancer Trust nights at the Royal Albert Hall, their first show together in nearly three years. Mayberry told the room they had been making a record, then asked for patience because they had never played the song in front of people. It opened on a pulsing industrial bass. She sang, “A man made for the microphone fills my pockets full of stones / All of his wives, all of his nine lives dance on the edge of a knife.”

The Pause Produced a Solo Album and a New Band

They stopped after the Screen Violence tour in 2023 and agreed the next chapter had to challenge them. The gap was not empty. Each member left the trio’s sound and brought something back.

THE YEARS BETWEEN RECORDS

1. August 27, 2021: Releases Screen Violence on EMI and Glassnote, written remotely during the pandemic.
2. Early 2022: Mayberry tells Cook and Doherty she wants a solo project; Cook forms Protection with Scott Paterson of Sons and Daughters.
3. 2023: The band pauses after touring. Mayberry starts a solo run. A half-finished Chvrches album, she later said, sits in the vault and will not be heard.
4. December 6, 2024: Mayberry releases Vicious Creature on EMI / Island, a pop record she framed as work she could not do inside the band.
5. 2025 into 2026: Doherty and Scott launch The Leaving, a heavier project that also signs to Futures Music Group.
6. March 2026: Chvrches play the Royal Albert Hall and debut “Conman.”
7. September 22, 2026: “Roses” lands on Futures. October 21: the album and tour are named.

Mayberry had talked about a solo outlet as far back as Love Is Dead in 2018, when mixed reviews followed two records that had been widely praised. She has said she was afraid the band might not last, and that putting every idea in one place created too much pressure. Screen Violence was the remote repair job. The pause was the split that let all three write like people who did not have to be Chvrches every day.

That is the hidden cost of the bet. They did not freeze the brand for five years. They let it sit while Mayberry made a pop record, Doherty made industrial rock, and Cook went acoustic at home. All The King’s Men is what they could stand to make after that.

The Files Stopped Flying in Glasgow

Screen Violence was assembled at a distance. For the follow-up they refused that method. They met for several intense three-week stints in Glasgow, in person, because they wanted a room that would let them try things they could not try over a shared drive.

Mayberry has described “Roses” as gut-first. The spoken bridge came out of her head before she knew what it meant, and it set the tone for what followed. In a later interview she said they talked about Portishead and Massive Attack in the studio as much as Scott Walker or Siouxsie, and that they wanted the new songs to feel tactile and human. The old claim, she admitted, was that Chvrches were fearless. She was not sure they had ever fully delivered on it.

Doherty, in February 2026, said the fifth album was about 90 percent done and that repeating themselves would be diminishing returns. “If you’re not taking risks now, then why do it?” he asked. “We’re at the point in our career now where if we get together to make a record, then we have to be really, really motivated to do it. We are.” He hoped it would surprise people, delight them, and “rip some faces off.”

The title borrows the nursery rhyme. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty together again. A fan looking at the artwork clocked the crown with a sword through it and called it on brand. The songs, as described, treat Britain as a place with a cracked shell.

Futures Music Group Leaves Them the Masters

The commercial half of the wager is the label. Chvrches formed in Glasgow in 2011 and built the catalog on Virgin, EMI, Goodbye and Glassnote. The Bones of What You Believe went BPI Gold. So did Every Open Eye, which hit No. 1 in Scotland, No. 4 in the UK and No. 8 on the Billboard 200. Love Is Dead went silver. Screen Violence opened at No. 4 on the UK albums chart and No. 1 in Scotland, then stalled at No. 31 in the United States. Their biggest Hot 100 moment was not even a Chvrches single. Marshmello’s “Here With Me,” in 2019, reached No. 9 in the UK and No. 31 in the US and went 2x Platinum at the RIAA.

FOUR ALBUMS AND THE FIFTH

Futures Music Group is a 2024 indie collective started by Derek Davies of Neon Gold and Dave Wallace of Avenue A, distributed through Virgin Music Group. Artists keep their masters. The standard split starts 50/50 and can move further toward the artist after profit thresholds. Davies and Wallace have worked with Chvrches since the band still spelled its name with a U, before the V that made CHVRCHES searchable. Signing them was, they said, a full-circle deal. The Leaving is on the same roster.

A band that once needed a major’s radio push is now selling a darker guitar record through an indie that advertises equity. That is part of the bet, not a footnote. They also asked fans to pre-order any format of the album from the official store, which unlocks the UK and Ireland tour presale.

27 Dates From Philadelphia to Shepherd’s Bush

The live half of the wager is scale. The 2022 Screen Violence run included the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and Brixton Academy in London. The 2027 routing puts Los Angeles at the Hollywood Palladium on March 14 and London at the o2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire on May 6. Those are theater and hall dates, not a victory lap through the biggest rooms they have already played.

THE TWO LEGS OF THE 2027 TOUR

The American run is a tight westbound chain: Brooklyn Steel, the Anthem in Washington, the Salt Shed in Chicago, then Knitting Factory rooms in Boise and Spokane, the Vogue in Vancouver, the Paramount in Seattle, Revolution Hall in Portland, the Fox in Oakland, and the Observatory North Park in San Diego. Toronto’s History and Vancouver are the only Canadian stops. After Los Angeles there is a 40-day gap, then three Scottish nights, Dublin’s 3Olympia, and a short English run through Manchester’s Victoria Warehouse, Birmingham, Bristol, Norwich and London.

The map has holes. There is no Boston, no Denver, no Mexico date, no Spain date. People who already missed them during covid are asking for a third try. The band is not pretending this is a global victory lap. It is a first routing behind a record nobody has heard in full.

North American mailing-list members who sign up before 16:00 local time on October 26 can register for the North American presale, which opens at 10:00 local on October 27. UK and Ireland presale opens at 10:00 local on October 28 for fans who pre-order by 19:30 on October 27. General sale is 10:00 local on October 30.

Our brand new album 'All The King's Men' will be released 22 January — and we're going back on tour.https://t.co/HRkGxnTIrt pic.twitter.com/NvLhwCqG1u

— CHVRCHES (@CHVRCHES) October 21, 2026

Before any of that, they play two charity nights that sold out as soon as the ballot opened: Glasgow on October 26 and London on October 29. Those rooms are the first public test of the new songs, in the cities that always had first claim on them. The album follows on January 22. Then the theaters.