Anyone who has spent more than a minute in a clothing store over the past few years has heard dozens of bands making a calculated, charmless attempt to duplicate what came so naturally to Chvrches on their zeitgeisty debut The Bones of What You Believe. Which leaves the real deal facing a tremendous challenge three years after emerging anonymously from their basement with "The Mother We Share". "After making one record that people really like, some bands reject the things that everyone liked about them and make some really deep, thoughtful, dark record," Martin Doherty admitted to Pitchfork earlier this year. Fortunately, the hard work and meticulous fine-tuning of Every Open Eye is so deeply embedded in the finished product that Chvrches never come off as self-conscious. Instead, it manifests as that uncanny, priceless quality of the truly popular: confidence.
Chvrches toured The Bones of What You Believe exhaustively, so they don't have to overthink what things "everyone" liked about them and which parts were scare-quotes deep, dark, and thoughtful. You’ll be really let down if you hoped Chvrches would build on the proggier excursions of "Science/Visions" or if you believed Doherty’s expansive, nearly-six minute closer "You Caught the Light" justified a bigger role. Otherwise, the band rightfully assume that their unabashed embrace of pop's ruthless economy got them playing festivals in front of thousands of pop fans.
So, when Lauren Mayberry belts, "we will take the best parts of ourselves and make them gold," it can be read as the band's artistic edict rather than one of the examples of her occasional slip into Millennial Successorizing ("I am chasing the skyline more than you ever will"). Nearly every moment of Every Open Eye is filled with aspiration and there's not a false step or bum note, verses and pre-choruses and choruses in brutal competition to be called "the hook." Mayberry summed it up as "emo with synths in it" in a recent podcast while expounding on a teenage love of Jimmy Eat World, and you can suss out a structural similarity between Every Open Eye and Bleed American (five radio-friendly bangers, ballad, four more radio-friendly bangers, slow-dance closer). Even the obvious deep cuts have a functional purpose—"Afterglow" is a slight comedown that still feels necessary as exit music after nearly 40 minutes of constant peaks, while Doherty's light-stepping, funk-pop inclusion "High Enough to Carry You Over" is an allowable indulgence for a band that truly prides itself on being a band, rather than Mayberry and Those Other Guys.
There's also an irrepressible buoyancy and reassurance, even if it's not just in her head where Mayberry feels looked down on. Her detailing of the brutal rape threats and casual misogyny she faces as a female public figure are both shocking and sadly familiar; she's more cagey about the personal relationships that serve as the lyrical muse for much of Every Open Eye. Though Mayberry's background in law and journalism served as an early footnote in the Chvrches come-up, she draws on that as much as any musical thread here. Whether asking for reconciliation ("Clearest Blue", "Empty Threat") or demanding closure ("Never Ending Circles", "Leave a Trace"), Mayberry is judge, jury, and executioner, making convincing, carefully worded closing arguments set to casually devastate.
With nearly all of mainstream pop's biggest acts looking toward the '80s for inspiration, Every Open Eye might be even more of-the-moment than its predecessor—Mayberry’s extracurriculars cast her lyrics in a feminist lens à la Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, while the arena-ready hooks justify the comparisons to pre-Violator Depeche Mode (the synth riff from "Clearest Blue" can't get enough of "Just Can't Get Enough") and the Pet Shop Boys. But minus the occasionally violent imagery of "Gun" and "By the Throat", Chvrches lack any of the qualities that made the aforementioned feel subversive or rebellious. This can actually work in their favor—"Leave a Trace" was memorably described by Mayberry as a "middle finger mic-drop," but her words are neatly manicured and polite enough to painlessly decapitate rather than bludgeon or incinerate. You can't have peak efficiency without formulas, though, and by the time "Playing Dead" and "Bury It" threaten to get mixed up on title alone, the similarly beaming melodies and diffident references to bones, crossed lines, and oceans start to render heartbreak, joy, resilience, and exhaustion interchangeable.
The minor flaws of Every Open Eye are much more acceptable in light of the hedge-betting sophomore efforts from Purity Ring and Disclosure, perhaps the two acts who've been more imitated over the past two years than Chvrches. They've moved past their earliest days when their competition was assumed to be M83 or Passion Pit or even the Knife, but in leveling up, they actually seem more conservative sonically, lyrically, and visually than the pure pop acts for whom they're used as a foil, i.e., Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, Rihanna... hell, maybe Justin Bieber? If Every Open Eye is Chvrches taking the best parts of themselves and making them gold, I can't wait to hear them try to go platinum.
