HOW quickly does five years go by? It depends who you are and what you’re doing. If you’re Lauren Mayberry, 30-year-old lead singer of Glasgow trio Chvrches, the answer is pretty quickly. She has spent the last half decade in a whirl of recording studios, tour buses, festival stages and television appearances – most recently performing new single Miracle on late-night US chat show institution The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – so she knows all about the disconnect between what you might call Chvrches time and real time. And in Chvrches time, life moves fast.

“It feels like you get home and your friends have 12 kids and live in a semi-detached house and the last thing I knew we were all doing shots in Nice N Sleazy,” she laughs when I ask the question. “We found out the other day that on May 10 it was six years since we first put stuff up on Soundcloud”. To which add: five years since the release of debut album The Bones Of What You Believe, three years since the appearance of its follow-up, Every Open Eye, and a mere two days since the release of the band’s third collection, the doomily-named Love Is Dead. By today’s standards, that work-rate counts as prolific.

It’s that third album which brings Mayberry and bandmates Iain Cook and Martin Doherty blinking into the light, preparing for another assault on the charts and (no small matter this) girding themselves for their first Scottish show in two years, part of a 51-date journey that takes them everywhere from Switzerland to Indonesia. For the record, Mayberry is speaking from New York where she has been living on and off for the last couple of years and where the band have convened to do whatever bands do in the days before this sort of epic, globe-trotting undertaking.

Four singles from the new album have already been released – among them My Enemy, a duet between Mayberry and Matt Berninger, lugubrious frontman with Cincinnati indie darlings The National – and there’s every chance Love Is Dead will repeat the achievements of the previous two albums and lodge itself high up the album charts.

That’s not to say there haven’t been changes which, though intended to strengthen Chvrches’ musical offering, do bring an element of risk. Where previous albums have been self-produced and recorded in Glasgow, Love Is Dead saw the band reconvene in Los Angeles and New York where they worked with pop luminary Greg Kurstin. He co-wrote Adele’s Hello, which should be calling card enough, though he also counts Sia’s Elastic Heart among his other writer-producer credits. Also on board is BRIT Award-winner Steve Mac, producer of number one hits such as Clean Bandit’s Symphony and Ed Sheeran’s Shape Of You, the biggest selling single of 2017. As musical helpmates go you could do a lot worse. But it’s a moot point whether the sheen they bring adds to or detracts from Chvrches’ sometimes moody sonics.

The presence of Berninger on the album is another step in a new direction but one which suggests moody sonics are still the name of the game. With Chvrches locked into a sound whose antecedents are whip-smart synth-pop acts such as Eurythmics and Pet Shop Boys, there doesn’t appear at first glance to be much common ground between them and The National. This, after all, is the band which once released a Grateful Dead tribute album. But first glances can be deceptive, Mayberry reminds me.

“The bands that we’ve found we have something in common with are bands like The National or Tegan And Sara and I feel like that’s because all three of us come from more alternative rock backgrounds,” she says. “We make music that’s pop but the way of writing it and especially the lyrical content feels like it has more in common with those bands than it does with radio pop.”

That’s not to say she didn’t have to pinch herself when she found herself working with Berninger, who’s something of a hero to her. “I used to work in a café off Kelvingrove and I would listen to Boxer [The National’s 2007 album] when I was tidying up at night. So it’s quite weird to have gone from mopping floors listening to Matt Berninger sing to having him sing lyrics we wrote. It’s pretty crazy. But I’ll take it.”

Addressing the sound of the new album, Mayberry has said in previous interviews that she thinks it’s the band’s poppiest to date but also its most aggressive. Can she expand on that?

“For me those two sides of the band have always existed, which is why we occupy this strange middle ground that we do,” she explains. “In one way it’s pop music and it’s definitely melodically very direct. But in other ways it’s quite introspective, especially lyrically. I don’t buy into this idea that pop has to be frivolous or vacuous and we’ve never subscribed to that. So this time we were not wanting to shy away from either side of that.” It is, she adds, “about distilling what we view as the split personality of the band.”

The album title needs some explanation as well. Where previous record Every Open Eye implied optimism, or at least expansiveness, Love Is Dead is, well, a little on the bleak side. Is that reflected in the lyrical content?

“I don’t think so,” says Mayberry. “We knew when we were naming this record that it was going to be quite a bold, theatrical thing to say. But to me it’s more about naming the collection of songs. I feel like when I listen to the record it sounds like someone trying to figure something out. I don’t know if every single day I agree with that album title, but sometimes I do. And I feel like the songs are about sitting with confusion or frustration or sadness and figuring out what to do with it, how to proceed and move forwards. The previous two records are just named after lyrics in the songs. To me those album titles are still about conflict.”

Another producer the band worked with on the album was Dave Stewart of The Eurythmics, though the songs he brought his many talents to didn’t make the finished record. “We’re really bummed,” says Mayberry, “but it was just because we did that [work with Stewart] right at the start of the process and by the time we had finished it just felt like those songs were too different sonically from where we ended up”. But despite the eventual outcome, working with the former Eurythmics man was “a real crazy life experience,” she says. “We all love The Eurythmics so much. They really wrote the book on what we try to do. They made pop music but it was so artful and so clever and creative, and the fact that he even wanted to get into a room with us was really exciting.”

He gave Mayberry in particular something else to think about too. “He was like: ‘Could you be trying harder? Could you be doing more? Could you be thinking about this more as a professional singer, someone who makes art rather than somebody who just walks through a door?’ When someone like that says stuff like that to you, you have to try to take it seriously.”

Stewart also referred to Mayberry as “a punk rock Joan of Arc”. It’s a great line, but what did she make of it?

“That’s the kind of thing I mean,” she says. “I don’t think of myself in that regard but so much of what I’ve learned about this band is that you can’t perform exactly how you feel all the time. You’re writing what you feel, authentically. But if I performed the way I feel a lot of the time I would perform with my back to people, in the dark. But that’s not the best way to communicate what you’re doing.”

Joan of Arc famously told it like she saw it, and was burned at the stake for her troubles. It might be stretching the comparison, but Mayberry’s strong feminist opinions and strident denunciation of sexist trolls and misogynistic social media users have seen her take her fair share of heat over the years.

“I just get off the internet periodically,” she says when I ask how she copes. Some criticism she accepts as valid, anyway: clearly some people just don’t like the music or the lyrics. “But the other things, the more aggressive things which are literally only because you’re a woman in that space and you’re not doing something that that person deems to be appropriate or appealing to them, that’s not really to do with me. That’s to do with how they feel about women. So as much as those things are shocking, I’m not shocked by them any more.”

Of course not being shocked isn’t the same thing as not being prepared to, as she puts it, “call bullshit” on stuff. “If we apologise and stay quiet and bend over backwards trying to appease people like that, then I don’t think it’s a good thing to put out into the world.”

Mayberry’s opinions are long-held and pre-date #MeToo and #TimesUp. In 2013 she penned an article for The Guardian which was essentially a broadside against online abuse and which detailed some of the worst examples aimed at her. Two years later, in an essay titled My Life, My Voice, My Body, My Rules written for Lena Dunham’s online feminist newsletter Lenny Letter, she opened up about an abusive relationship she had been in. Post-Weinstein, she sees things changing. But slowly.

“I feel like it’s really positive that this conversation is being had on a more mainstream level and that more people are involved and ultimately – hopefully – that’s what will change things in the long run and it won’t be so niche a conversation,” she says. “But even five years ago when we were talking about this it wasn’t a niche conversation. To me it was common sense 30 f****** years before that.”

But she still notes that every interview she ever does – including this one, I don’t doubt – is about gender in some way or other. Initially the questions were about being “the girl in the band”. Then, after her article in The Guardian, they changed tack. “But it was always like: ‘Why do you feel like that? Justify your opinion? Please explain to me why you’re being so belligerent?’.” Now, she says, “the same journalists who would have asked those dumb-ass questions four years ago are saying: ‘In the light of #MeToo how do you feel about this?’ and I say: ‘Well you’re still talking to me about it but at least you’re more on the same page, maybe because society has pushed you there’. But I think that’s a good thing. Maybe some of us need a push. I feel like at the moment it’s really important that people are making these big symbolic gestures and nailing their colours to the mast.”

Serious question: would she go into politics? She doesn’t hesitate. “No, I don’t think I would.” But she does think about what she would do if the band “went away”, as she puts it, or about the sorts of things that might make her not want to continue in it.

“It just feels like constant conflict a lot of the time and I think that’s because of the things we’ve said and the things that we represent to people. It’s not like that all the time but when you’re the only person on the receiving end sometimes it does feel constant. And I think that’s the thing that would make me want to stop – knowing you’ve reached your emotional capacity to deal with that.”

But don’t worry, it won’t happen before July 8 when Chvrches take to the stage of the TRNSMT festival on Glasgow Green. Held over two weekends in late June and early July the band’s closing night slot will mark a long-awaited homecoming and a first of sorts for Mayberry: half a lifetime ago, aged 15, she had her first taste of a festival show when she attended the 2004 Download Festival there, headlined by Metallica and Linkin Park. “I saw a man pissing on the fence at, like, 11am when I got there,” she laughs. “I’m hoping this one is slightly less feral than that.”

Love Is Dead is out now on Virgin Records. Chvrches play Glasgow Green as part of the TRNSMT festival on July 8