In 2023, with the approach of the 10th anniversary of CHVRCHES' groundbreaking debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, Mayberry felt reflective in a way she hadn’t anticipated. Looking back at all of the incredible moments of personal evolution and musical growth during her years with the band, she realized that she had hit a creative wall that she wanted to move through. Much like the artists who only lived in her headphones as a teenager, there was a part of her own artistry she had locked away. She says, “There’s things I’ve never been comfortable performing or sharing with a band of men. As much as my time with the band has always had this feminist narrative underpinning it, a lot of my role felt like it was more about me trying to fit in than leading the conversation, and I wondered what it would look like for me to create under different circumstances.” 

With Vicious Creature, her debut solo album, Mayberry was seeking freedom from rules and expectations and preconceptions. The album title comes from a lyric: “Nostalgia is such a vicious creature, another way to say that you fear the future” (from “A Work Of Fiction’). “Obsession with the past has always been a difficult thing for me,” she explains. “I hold onto things like a dog, to be honest, and I stay loyal to people long past the point that it’s logical or healthy. Nostalgia makes me romanticize people and places that weren’t really good for me, or obsessively dwell on things that have happened. It makes it hard for me to move on sometimes. And I think that is what so much of starting this solo journey was always about for me: trying to find a way to get unstuck and to move on, in my life and in my creativity.