On paper, it shouldn’t work: Two grizzled veterans of dour, navel-gazing Glasgow post-rock bands team up with a young singer raised on third-wave emo. They make bright, shiny synth-pop that is entirely self-written and self-produced, but is so immaculately constructed, it feels like it was built by a team of scientists. And yet, in 2013, The Bones of What You Believe served as the ideal wake-up call for those stumbling blearily out of the chillwave daze.

 On soaring songs like “The Mother We Share,” “We Sink,” and “Recover,” Lauren Mayberry’s crystalline voice deconstructs fractured relationships with beguiling poetics and brutal honesty, while the music swells with a mastery of dancefloor dynamics that nods to New Order and Depeche Mode. On their debut album, Chvrches ushered in a new era of dance pop with an indie soul. A thousand Spotify-core bands bloomed in their wake, but none could ever capture the same magic

  1. The Mother We Share
  2. We Sink
  3. Gun
  4. Tether
  5. Lies
  6. Under The Tide