CHVRCHES are Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty. Since emerging in 2013 with their UK and US top 10 breakthrough album The Bones of What You Believe, the band have always projected an insularity and a left-of-the-middle approach, historically focusing on self-producing their work to find their unique balance between the dark and the light; between alternative and pop.

After self-writing-and-producing their first two albums, The Bones of What You Believe and its 2015 follow-up, Every Open Eye, the band opened up the process on their 2018 offering, Love Is Dead, welcoming outside influence in the form of GRAMMY Producer of the Year Greg Kurstin. The band toured extensively until the end of 2019, returning home with the intent of going back to their insular beginnings to make new music.

“Like everyone, I’ve had a lot of time to think and reflect over the past year; to examine experiences I had previously glossed over or deeply buried. I feel like I have spent a lot of my life (personally and professionally) performing the uncomfortable balancing act that is expected of women and it gets more confusing and exhausting the older I get,” explains CHVRCHES’ frontwoman Mayberry of ‘He Said She Said’.

“Be successful but only in the way we want you to be. Speak up for yourself but not so loudly that you steal men’s thunder. Be attractive but only for the benefit of men, and certainly don’t be vain. Strive to be The Hot Sad Girl but don’t actually be sad in a way that’s inconvenient for anyone. Be smart but not smart enough to ask for more than what you’re being given.”

Mayberry continues: “‘He Said She Said’ is my way of reckoning with things I’ve accepted that I know I shouldn’t have. Things I pretended weren’t damaging to me. It was the first song we wrote when we started back up, and the opening line (“He said, You bore me to death”) was the first lyric that came out. All the verse lines are tongue-in-cheek or paraphrased versions of things that have actually been said to me by men in my life. Being a woman is fucking exhausting and it felt better to scream it into a pop song than scream it into the void. After the past year, I think we can all relate to feeling like we’re losing our minds.”