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May 23, 2018Love Is Dead continues to ask questions of the world, but realises they’re not always black and white, or in CHVRCHES case, light or dark.
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May 23, 2018The third album by Glasgow’s Chvrches, Love is Dead, is the sound of your heart as it falls back in love.
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May 31, 2018Chvrches have made their most fully-realized effort to date (musically, anyway).
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Jun 11, 2018Heavily weighty with fiery doom and gloom, Lauren Mayberry masters the art of colourfully abstract lyrics.
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May 29, 2018Over two self-produced top 10 albums, Lauren Mayberry, Martin Doherty and Iain Cook, all graduates of alternative and post-rock bands, have refined a sound that keeps one foot in indie electronica, the other in modern radio pop and its heart in 80s synths.
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May 25, 2018Celebratory, rich and more confident than ever before, they’re yet again the finest versions of themselves.
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May 24, 2018Love Is Dead manages to balance hopeful, utopian pop with a darker, gloomier undercurrent.
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May 24, 2018Not exactly a faultless record, by any stretch of the imagination, Love Is Dead nonetheless confirms that The Bones of What You Believe was far from a fluke effort and that the band, regardless of the success found in the intervening years, are still capable of delivering exciting, engaging and boundary-pushing synth-pop when it really matters.
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MojoMay 21, 2018Many sure-footed, instantly memorable songs. [Jun 2018, p.88]
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May 21, 2018Love Is Dead shows CHVRCHES attaining a greater urgency and darkness in tracks such as the dramatic, M83-esque Deliverance and My Enemy, a stuttering, drugged up duet between Mayberry and The National’s Matt Berninger.
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May 29, 2018Love Is Dead brims with that kind of confidence: assertive but not showy, passionate but not gaudy, and wholly necessary.
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May 25, 2018The songs sound bigger and more layered, but the core of hook-laden, synth-based pop and Lauren Mayberry’s lilting vocals remains undisturbed.
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May 25, 2018"Deliverance" is spiky yet inviting, its lyrics poking at the hypocrisy of religion; "Never Say Die" builds its drama with swooning synths, with Mayberry's clipped "never-never-never" on the chorus providing an italicized exclamation point.
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May 25, 2018The most impressive thing about Love is Dead might be that as big as its sound gets, Chvrches never lose touch with the humanity that's at the core of their music.
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May 24, 2018So much goes right here, but in scrubbing their songs of imperfections, they've also magnified their flaws. Though not quite stuck in neutral, it will certainly please the band's ever-expanding fan base while not really moving the needle creatively enough to convince sceptics that their initial opinions were unfounded.
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May 30, 2018Love Is Dead is admirably righteous, but it’s chilly, lacking the rallying impact of peers who have shown that empathy is more powerful than polemic.
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Jul 25, 2018Love is Dead is formally earnest and it succumbs as a product of its (unearnest) production, an art of sincerity lost underneath. Love is Dead, damnably, is sincerity in place of irony, which is to say sincerity outside irony. It has no world to tease of tense.
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May 30, 2018Love Is Dead is not a terrible album and it certainly has its moments, but it’s not as engaging or interesting as its predecessors.
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May 25, 2018Love Is Dead is not a bad album, it's just that this felt like CHVRCHES' time for a great one. Love Is Dead is not that, either.
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May 24, 2018In 2018, as it becomes more pressing than ever for artists to use their platforms to speak out, Love Is Dead pursues clarity, both in production and politics, with mixed results.
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UncutMay 24, 2018Though the stadium-EDM elements of "Miracle" are an unwelcome addition and there's a slight clash between two brands of brooding, when Matt Berninger guests on "My Enemy," Chvrches excel at an electro-pop simulacrum that's actually more craftily structured than most of their favourite records of 1982. [Jul 2018, p.26]
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May 24, 2018It’s difficult not to see how this album, in an attempt to appeal to a much wider audience, won’t end up splitting their fanbase. It won’t alienate anyone who wants a fine pop album, but it may disappoint those who had come to expect something more interesting than that from the trio.
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Q MagazineMay 21, 2018Love Is Dead's songs, however, don't so much burrow into your brain as thwack you over the head, and the band's tendency to fashion refrains from little more than the song titles means some tracks are memorable simply by dint of merciless repetition. [Jul 2018, p.114]
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May 24, 2018Many of these songs will soar in arenas and on festival main stages. They’re expansive, epic, and Mayberry’s powerful voice never wavers. But that openness comes at a price, and throughout Love Is Dead, every time CHVRCHES have the chance to get stranger, messier, and more unique, they rein in their eccentricities, going cleaner and more general.
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May 25, 2018All of those tracks ["God’s Plan," "My Enemy" and "Wonderland"] feel sparse, built softly with a light touch, which is why the overblown, full-steam-ahead manner of much of the rest of the album is so maddening and--given their past pronouncements on big studios and producers--so utterly perplexing.
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May 21, 2018The handful of songs produced by the band themselves—“My Enemy,” the brooding new wave track “God's Plan,” and the gentle ballad “Really Gone”—stand out in their deviation from the glossy, monolithic tracks helmed by producer Greg Kurstin.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 83 out of 112
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Mixed: 21 out of 112
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Negative: 8 out of 112
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May 25, 2018
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May 26, 2018
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May 26, 2018