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.