Lauren Mayberry steps out of the band Chvrches for a solo album that shows her influences

NEW YORK (AP) — The birth of Lauren Mayberry as a solo artist should be marked by something like a wolf cry. And that's exactly what it sounds like.

The vocalist and percussionist from the Scottish pop band Chvrches has punctuated her debut album with a playful howl while telling off an ex-lover on the song “Crocodile Tears.”

“This moment in time is exactly the chapter where I get to howl like a wolf in a song if I want to. And I don’t have to feel weird about it,” she says.

Mayberry, 37, is enjoying the freedom to create whatever she likes, away from the synth-pop of the band she has been with since her early 20s.

"It’s a mission statement of all things that you like, and you just go in and write the song that feels like it wants to be written on that day, which was quite refreshing," she says.

The 12 tracks of “Vicious Creature,” out Dec. 6 via Island, veer from the coffee house folk of “Anywhere But Dancing” to the punky “Punch Drunk,” the dance-pop of “Change Shapes” and stuttering glam of “Sorry, Etc.”

If Chvrches — with members Iain Cook and Martin Doherty — usually works first with melodies and production before lyrics, Mayberry wanted to reverse the process.

“I knew that I wanted it to be more focused on the storytelling,” she says. “It was nice to be able to go into a studio with a title idea or with a concept and then work back from that.”

Mayberry cites Sinead O'Connor, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple and Annie Lennox as influences. She credits the yodel inflection in her voice to having listened to so much Alanis Morissette.

“It was those influences I wanted to dig into a bit more in my own material,” she says. “When I thought back to what are the key influences on me as a writer, it isn’t really a lot of synth-pop stuff. So then it’s interesting that that’s what I became so associated with."

Mayberry worked on her new album with producers Greg Kurstin, Matthew Korma, Tobias Jesso Jr., Ethan Gruska and Dan McDougall. She started writing in spring 2022 and had studio sessions in between touring with Chvrches.

McDougall, who has previously worked with Sigrid and Jason Mraz, co-wrote and played on four tracks and says he and Mayberry went into the studio hoping to push the boundaries.

“We didn’t really have one specific lane in mind for the genre we were going down," he says. "We were just being experimental, and I guess the freedom within that just brought us something a bit different.”

One track — “Sunday Best” — was in part inspired by “Once In a Lifetime” by Talking Heads and by her mother's illness. "Keep thinking one day maybe I will find the beauty in goodbye,” she sings. The title comes from funeral clothes.

“I thought I was finally writing a hopeful, cheerful, uplifting song, and then I was like, 'Well, still about death, isn’t it?'” Mayberry says, laughing. “Maybe it's a Scottish thing. I don’t know. We’re just a bit morose.”

On the album, Mayberry explores mortality, nostalgia, societal pressures, arrogant exes and her band ("I killed myself to be one of the boys,” she sings in one song.)

“The lyrics I like least that I’ve written are ones that I know didn’t feel very authentic to me,” she says. “I think you can hear in somebody’s physical voice when they’re singing, whether they mean something or not. So my only brief is like, 'Does it feel fake?'”

Regardless of how the album does with critics or charts, Mayberry is proud it's out there, proof of her musicianship and confirmation that she doesn't need anyone to make good songs.

"No matter what happens with this record, I feel like it was more about proving to myself than to anybody else. Because if you never try it, then you’re never going to know."

The album ends with the somber piano-led “Are You Awake?” as Mayberry takes a hard look at her life choices. Her friends have settled down — “Been counting their babies and their diamond wedding rings” — and her career expectations are heavy: “Hometown hero is a poisoned chalice choice," she sings.

“The end of that song opens up in a way to a question mark. And I think that’s kind of how I feel about what will happen after the rest of this," she says.

Mayberry isn't sure what's next for Chvrches. The three members have been working on their own projects and the door seems open for a reunion despite Mayberry spreading her wings.

“It’s hard once you’ve felt the wind in your hair to not enjoy that as an experience,” she says. “But my hope is that the two things can coexist. I do think that everybody getting experiences outside of the band will mean that we have different things to offer each other when we come to write again.”

Lauren Mayberry poses for a portrait on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

Lauren Mayberry poses for a portrait on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

Lauren Mayberry poses for a portrait on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

Lauren Mayberry poses for a portrait on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

Lauren Mayberry poses for a portrait on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

FILE - Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches performs at the BottleRock Napa Valley Music Festival on May 27, 2022, in Napa, Calif. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)

This album cover image released by Island Records shows "Vicious Creature" by Lauren Mayberry (Island Records via AP)

FILE - Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches performs during iHeartRadio's ALTer EGO concert in Inglewood, Calif, on Jan. 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)