Quotes from Lauren Mayberry

When I'm writing, it's because I'm trying to figure something out for myself. If I don't believe in what I've written, then how can I expect anyone else to believe in that, either?

I love the hamster but I think if I took him on tour he might die.

Seeing people communicate about the band online has been amazing, but I think a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about what they hate rather than what they love. I don't want to get trapped in that.

I think a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about what they hate rather than what they love. I don't want to get trapped in that.

I'm conscious of what bands we tour with and what companies I want to be associated with, even in the small things: if I'm going to buy stage makeup, I want to get it from companies run by women. Those are little changes that will make a difference.

The film world feels like a smaller world than music.

I get this weird, existential crisis when I'm looking through Instagram - and then I'll realize we work in entertainment. We know all the smoke and mirrors.

A relationship can be deeply damaging without anyone leaving marks on you. So many people - especially young women - end up trying to maintain those emotionally abusive relationships because we don't think it's that bad and that we are really some of the lucky ones because we haven't experienced 'real' abuse.

I learned drumming as a second instrument because I didn't want to sing. Sometimes I would quite like to be left in the back, in the darkness by myself.

I don't know Justin Bieber so I wouldn't want to marry a man I don't know.

When people say stuff to us casually in reviews, if they write about it in a condescending way with really gendered language, that's not really about me. It used to hurt my feelings more than it does now. That's not about us as a band or me as a person. That's about how you feel about women, and that's a societal thing.

I went to an island in the Bahamas full of iguanas. You don't live on the island, obviously, because it's solely populated by iguanas, and it's not allowed.

I wouldn't want to do a solo project.

After the first album, I spent a lot of time being like, 'I'm not really a singer.' That kind of mentality doesn't help.

I've always worked in cinemas or cafes to make money because it turns out freelance journalism is quite hard to get into.

If you give me half an hour on the Internet, I can hate myself completely by the end of that 30 minutes.

I operate a pretty strict muting and blocking policy on Twitter.

If people are really hateful and disgusting in the way they treat other people, that probably came from a hurt place - but then, when does it stop? When does this spiral end? Sometimes you can get pretty melancholic about that.

The music industry isn't unionised in the same way Hollywood is. If I've got a problem, who do I go to?

It's nice to squash people's expectations.

Just because I front the band or we play bigger stages now, it doesn't mean we somehow suddenly changed the way we approach things. We all still view what we do as indie and alternative in terms of how we execute it, even if the actual music we make is more pop than our previous projects.

We went from playing small clubs to quite big stages quite quickly, and a lot of the time, I felt like I was trying to catch up with myself. Figuring out how to take up space was an interesting journey.

I worked in a lot of cinemas when I was at college, and I'm a movie dork, and it's a nice thing to do while you're on tour. Everything is different a lot of the time - you're never in the same place - but I like going to the cinema because it feels like no matter where you are, the experience is really the same.

My dissertation was on the idea of feminine-themed women's magazines, so like how the ideal woman is put across by women's magazines.