The Scots in Chvrches put out The Bones of What You Believe, their first LP, in the summer of 2013, to rapturous acclaim; it featured confirmed hitters “The Mother We Share” and “Recover,” both tracks that established the band’s synthy, arena-filling sound. Ten days after the album’s release, though, the band found itself embroiled in a mini (read: faux) scandal: Lauren Mayberry, the group’s lead singer, had written an op-ed in The Guardian denouncing misogyny, and people lost their minds.

“What I do not accept,” she wrote, “is that it is all right for people to make comments ranging from ‘a bit sexist but generally harmless’ to openly sexually aggressive.” With everything that’s happened since—#GamerGate, the rise of the alt-right and open white supremacy, Trump’s election to the presidency—that earlier controversy has come to seem quaint. “I guess we're lucky in a way,” Mayberry says earlier this month when I met her and the rest of the band at a cafe in Greenpoint. “We said one thing about feminism…It kinda forced our hand, in a way.” They were way ahead of the curve. “Now we fit more with what the current conversation is, but there were definitely a few years where it felt like people were fucking coming for me, because I hadn't abided by the agenda or whatever.”

And she’s still not abiding by it on Chvrches’ third album, Love Is Dead, a tightly woven, synth-heavy collection of arena-ready pop songs. While it’s by no means a political record, it has been shaped by Mayberry’s politics, because she’s the group’s main songwriter. “I think a song like ‘Graves’”—which has the chorus “Oh baby can you look away / while they’re dancing on our graves?”—“is probably more obviously political than the previous stuff that we've done, but I don't think we went and wrote a record for manifestos or whatever,” she says. “I feel like it's quite a hopeful record, but it's about sitting with that kind of struggle and frustration and confusion and anger, or unhappiness, and then figuring out what to do with it.” Even so, writing the record came easy; most of it was written in a small New York City studio, and then recorded in L.A. “More than anything else, I don't really remember the nuts and bolts of when we were recording it,” says Martin “Doc” Doherty, who plays synths and sings backup. “I remember the really soft light [coming] off of all the keyboards... being surrounded by them. And I was very moved and emotional about what we were doing, and then writing songs very, very quickly as a result,” he said.