Chvrches‘ Martin Doherty and Jonny Scott have spoken to NME about forming new album The Leaving to turn heavy trauma into therapeutic rave music, and an incoming “fearless” new album from the Scottish synth-pop heroes.
The multi-instrumentalist and live drummer from Chvrches surprised fans at the end of last year with the pummelling and industrial debut single ‘Saved’, and have this week shared the bittersweet euphoria of ‘Pray’. Both tracks speak of the journey from grief to strength that the project was born from.
Meeting at university on a day when they both happened to be wearing Radiohead T-shirts, Doherty and Scott bonded over a love of rave, industrial music and counterculture. After both working as musicians, songwriters and producers with the likes of The Kills, The Twilight Sad, Aerogramme, Mogwai and Idlewild, the two Glasgow artists came to work together again when Scott joined Chvrches as live drummer in 2018 for the touring of their third album ‘Love Is Dead’.
It was when they both found themselves living in Los Angeles and going through some very difficult times that brought the pair together with a much more personal purpose.
“Some of the songs that ended up on this project started out as a reaction to feeling quite lonely,” Doherty told NME. “I haven’t really talked about this, but a bunch of really traumatic things happened in a row. You know how people like to spend their lives complaining about how much things are going against them when really nothing was? I was maybe one of those people, then when real shit actually happens, it flattens you.
“My dad died, while Chvrches felt as far away from being a thing as it’s ever been. We never split up. Right now, we’re about 90 per cent finished on album five, but at that point I was 23 and felt like there was no one in my orbit. I was living out here [in LA], and a succession of familial tragedies started with my dad.”
Admitting that he’d usually “have a veil between what’s going on in my life and what I’m writing”, Doherty found himself penning lyrics for the first time. “I was afraid of writing what was true to me, then there was this window into me and I was writing about things that normally I wouldn’t,” he went on.
“I’d never dreamt of talking about grief, mental health, isolation, agoraphobia. I grew up in Glasgow for the first 30-odd years of my life and you don’t talk about this kind of shit where I come from. Ours is to keep it in; ours is to exude strength above all else. Now in 2026 it’s much different, but when I was 18 you didn’t tell your friends that you weren’t feeling right. There was such a huge stigma attached to that.”
While Doherty was “unpacking a lot of old shit as well as finding away through the first real loss and tragedy that I’d ever experienced in my life”, his old friend Jonny Scott soon found himself in LA too, working through a dark period of his own.
“I was going through my own shit at that point as well,” Scott told NME. “My life had basically blown apart, so I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to LA’. Martin bringing all this to the table just really spoke to me. We’d always been there for each other.”
The duo spent a month in the studio writing an initial batch of four songs before Doherty shared the more personal material he had. “It was pretty obvious what they were about and it became more apparent while we were working on them,” said Scott. “I’m not good at talking about things because I’m Scottish, but there’s an almost telepathic thing between me and Martin when we’re making music. There’s an unspoken trust. We weren’t putting it out there, getting super personal and talking about it, but it was almost like a therapy session.
“It would maybe be uncomfortable for some people to have a friend express those things, but it wasn’t for me. We were both going through it at the time and it felt magical.”
Bonded further through music and recovery, Doherty and Scott founded The Leaving on a foundation of trust. “I realised Jonny is one of the only people on earth I can trust and I started to let go,” said Doherty of the most personal music he’s ever made. “Unless you’re saying real shit, I don’t think anyone cares.”
Check out the rest of our interview with The Leaving below, where Doherty and Scott tell us about how Scottish counterculture is part of their DNA, plans for playing live, and how Chvrches’ new album is going to “rip some faces off”.
NME: Hello, The Leaving. What made you do your own thing instead of taking these songs to Chvrches?
Martin Doherty: “Historically, there would be Chvrches material that would happen from me in the background. In the very beginning, this is just what I was writing and I didn’t know what it was for. What I knew with certainty is that Iain [Cook] and Lauren [Mayberry] were excited to do their own projects in the short-term. I completely respected it. If I could have been honest with myself then I would have felt the same way, but I was terrified.
“We’d been on the road for 10 years after making four records – bang-bang-bang-bang – we’d just come through COVID and on paper we had everything we’d ever wanted, but they said, ‘We want to do something else for a year’. I was completely lost. I’d poured every ounce of my identity and time into this thing. We didn’t split up, but overnight it disappeared. I like certainty and my fear of the unknown is pretty full-on! All I was looking at was unknowns, in tandem with crises everywhere I looked in my personal life. These songs weren’t for Chvrches, but I didn’t think they’d be for this. I’m not a solo musician as I find that unfulfilling.”
So you needed a new band?
Doherty: “For me, writing songs, playing music and writing music is about connecting. These songs were coming out and going on the pile. There was no plan, and that was about a year before Jonny moved to LA.
“There’s a cinema called Vidiots around the corner from my house. We went to see The Substance and it had this hard-electro playlist in the background. We were really into it, stuff like The Faint. We forgot how much we fucked with that shit. That was the stuff you’d listen to before a night out. We said, ‘Why have we never done something like this before?’ Jonny said, ‘I don’t know. Do you want to go into the studio tomorrow? I’m free’. We wrote ‘Saved’ that day and then never left the studio for two months.”
And it takes a certain something to turn suffering into danceable bangers…
Doherty: “Here’s the real shit: we grew up on Scottish counter-culture. This begins in school with bonkers happy-hardcore and all the rave brands you got from your crazy uncle who you thought was just a bit mad, but now realise he was probably an ecstasy dealer. I remember tuning in with my cousins to pirate radio and it was just some guy in a flat on a council estate having a party with 180BPM rave tunes.
“Then it graduates into a more Rustie, Sub Club, Optimo thing – all at the same time of the well-storied Glasgow indie heritage. We grew up as these hybrid nutcase partiers who want to go to the rave, who want to be in a warehouse at 6am but then the next day want to get their Leonard Cohen on and write poetry. There’s been this dichotomy the whole time. The bangers and hard club music are in our DNA as appreciators and creators. While we might bond over Radiohead T-shirts, you’re not putting that on before you go to the club.
“It was fun for us to finally flex that muscle. Although there have been shades of that in Chvrches and stuff we’ve done before, we never had the chance to foreground it.”
And it all rocks pretty hard too…
Doherty: “We’re massive Nine Inch Nails fans. I remember being smashed on Hardcore Cider in Jonny’s room at uni, watching the ‘And All That Could Have Been’ live DVD over and over again. It gets in your bones and it never leaves. We just showed up at the studio and this is the music that naturally came out of us. I fucking hate it when people say ‘authentic’, but I don’t have a better word.”
And are there plans for The Leaving to play live? One predicts a sort of nosebleed-inducing goth rave?
Doherty: “There will be some of that.”
Scott: “That’s the plan. We’ve not worked out exactly how we’re going to play the tunes live but there’s definitely going to be some goth rave elements in there for sure.”
Doherty: “We have this opportunity that we’ll discuss longterm, which is that we are wherever Chvrches are. If a club promoter wants to put us on at 2am in the city we’ve just played, then why wouldn’t we do that? It’s a joke that musicians work for 90 minutes per day and complain about it. Instead of sitting on the bus, talking shit and playing computer games, we could play a gig, sleep all day and let that be the cycle. We’re basically nocturnal anyway.”
Chvrches have been at work on album number five, which you said earlier was 90 per cent done. What can we expect from that?
Doherty: “Oh, man. People are going to be excited. It’s the most fearless record we’ve ever made. We’re definitely not interested in repeating ourselves. It’s diminishing returns if the fifth record sounds like the first. What’s the point? If you’re not taking risks now, then why do it? 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. Jonny’s played on the whole thing and been in our pocket the whole time, so he’s very connected to it too.
“It’s going to surprise people, and I hope it’s going to delight them and rip some faces off. It’s quite hard, but not to the point where you won’t recognise the band. It’s still the same people and DNA.”
So Chvrches haven’t gone metal?
Doherty: “No, as fun as that would be for all concerned! We went back to Glasgow to make this record. I live half my life in Glasgow hanging out with my mum, and we wanted the album to still feel very British and Scottish. When you look outside and see rain and anger, you write the rain and you write the anger. That’s where our heads are at.”
As for the future of The Leaving, have you got something out of your system or is this part of you now as a never-ending project?
Doherty: “We’ve just finished the album, and as soon as we’ve got a minute we’ll be back in the studio to start the next one. I have ideas.”
Scott: “We were writing so much material that there’s a lot of good shit lying around.”
Doherty: “In my mind, this is very much a thing. This is not a side-project. This is a project that was always supposed to happen.”
‘Pray’ by The Leaving is out now. News of a debut album is expected in the coming months. Chvrches will be appearing at the Robert Smith-curated Teenage Cancer Trust shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Friday March 27 alongside My Bloody Valentine.
