Photo credit: Jody Evans
CHVRCHES release “Overthinker,” the second single to be lifted from their eagerly anticipated new album All The King’s Men. The forthcoming album’s standout ballad, “Overthinker,” is BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record and arrives the night after a special intimate charity show for 100 lucky fans at Assumption Studios in Glasgow, the converted church where the album was recorded.
The song blends euphoria and emotional ache over driving, pulsing synths and shimmering hooks. Turning inward, ‘Overthinker’ shifts the album’s focus from societal pressures to the things much closer to home. In a song about complicated family dynamics, Mayberry describes a relationship with “someone who is your shelter and your storm” and the difficulty of that contradiction and living in the ‘winter’ of someone’s depression or discontent. “Should I lie to you, keep my thoughts from you?”, she sings. “You ask after my friends, if I’m getting thinner, not sure how you raised such a chronic overthinker.”
All The King’s Men, the band’s first album in almost six years, is due for release on 22 January 2027 in LP, CD, cassette and digital formats via Futures ✦. The band – Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty – took their pause in 2023 after touring their fourth UK Top 10 album Screen Violence, with all agreed that when they returned, their next chapter had to challenge and excite them. The result is All The King’s Men, a self-consciously British freewheeling collection of 11 tracks of vividly emotional indie rock that fans won’t expect, and neither did they.
In the intervening years all three members were consciously and unconsciously absorbing material for their return. On his frequent trips back to Scotland to spend time with his mother, Doherty had reconnected with gritty British cinema by auteurs like Shane Meadows and Ken Loach – not incidentally the ones who stare down the barrel of the UK’s worst social issues – and UK artists like Massive Attack, Souxsie & The Banshees, and PJ Harvey. Meanwhile, Mayberry had done her 10,000 hours of sessions and leveled up as a lyricist, and came looking to make music that showcases a fresh storytelling quality and vocal range, and Cook – still living in the band’s Scotland home base – had started to reject electronics in favor of writing with acoustic instruments, and was listening to Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and Incredible String Band.
With none of them approaching creation in the same way, they eschewed the remote working of Screen Violence to meet for multiple, intense three-week stints in Glasgow. They knew recording in-person and in Scotland was exactly the environment necessary for experimentation on this record.
A first taste came last month in the form of ‘Roses’ – a scathing piece of contemporary social commentary, a confrontation with the darker undercurrents of Britain, with Mayberry snarling, “raise a glass to delusions of the good days of blood and wine; of pearls for swine.” The song’s Orwellian closing announcement, “If I may command your undivided attention, now we can start,” set the stage for what is to come with All The King’s Men.
