Lauren Mayberry of the Scottish synth-pop band Chvrches says she wanted the songs on her debut solo album, “Vicious Creatures,” to be personal, but the emotions that surfaced still caught her by surprise.

“A lot of that stuff snuck up on me,” says Mayberry, who brings the Vicious Creatures Tour to the Belasco in Los Angeles tonight. “When I started making the record, I thought I wanted it to be all this kind of theatrical, dramatic, character-driven stuff, which definitely does exist on the album.

“But those songs” (especially, “Oh, Mother,” written about a long illness of her mom’s) “came out by accident,” she says. “I kind of love that your brain will do what it wants; whatever plans your conscious brain has, your subconscious is going to take you to wherever it has to. ‘Oh, Mother’ was probably the fastest song on the record to get written, and it was the last thing that came out on the last day in the studio.”

Mayberry, who joined Iain Cook and Martin Doherty in Chvrches in 2010, collaborated with friends and strangers on “Vicious Creatures,” including Dan McDougall, who on “Oh, Mother” encouraged her to go deeper in search of emotional truths.

“I think that song had to be written with somebody that I knew well,” Mayberry says of McDougall. “This is the first time we’ve ever written together, so I think it kind of helped that we had years of friendship and stuff you talk about in the pub and over dinner in there.

“I started trying to write yet another song about homesickness, I think,” she says. “Then he started playing these nice piano chords and was like, ‘I think it needs to be something more cutting than that.’ He suggested a concept and I was like, hmm, would I do that? I don’t know. Then we riffed on it for like 20 minutes to see if it was too unpleasant to write about. And he was right. So there you go, turns out.”

In hindsight, Mayberry says, having control over the direction of that song also allowed her to be more vulnerable than she might have been in more traditional studio collaborations with co-writers and producers.

“I hate those sessions, especially L.A. or London writing sessions, where you go in and immediately someone’s like, ‘So what have you been going through? What’s happening with you?’ ” she says.

“I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I’m Scottish, I don’t (bleepin’) know you,’ ” Mayberry says. “I can’t just gush at anybody. I guess it was just about finding your people and making things in what feels like a comfortable space.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Mayberry talked about how she came to live in Los Angeles, why it’s fun to have blood and glitter onstage, and more.

Q: So tell me about the decision to take a hiatus from Chvrches to make your solo debut.

A: I think it felt like a natural ebb or a natural end of a chapter, sort of, in the band universe. Because we’ve been together for like 12 years. We were talking about the 10th anniversary of the first album. We’d finished out the record contract we were on, and we were coming towards the end of an album cycle.

Obviously, we’ve been so lucky with everything that’s happened with the band. But, you know, I joined the band when I was 23, and I think there’s always going to be a natural curiosity to see what other creative things you might like to do or explore.

I think the best thing about a band that’s been as consistently well-received as Chvrches is that you know what people, in theory, want from you. But in some ways, that’s a bit of a curse at the same time, because then you’re kind of boxed in a little bit.

Q: What kinds of things changed when it was just you creating the songs and music?

A: The main thing I wanted to do was be a lot more focused lyrically. When we write in the band, it tends to be music and instruments and production first, and then vocal melodies. Then, lyrics go last. So sometimes as a lyricist, that can be a little tricky if you’re not specifically connecting to the piece of music that we’re making, or if you don’t really have anything you think fits what that sounds like or feels like.

Q: There’s a lot of musical variety on the album. “Oh, Mother” is just voice and piano. “Sorry, Etc.,” which follows it, is kind of garage punky. “Anywhere But Dancing” has a folk or singer-songwriter feel to it. Tell me how the variety came together.

A: I think a lot of the songs, like “Crocodile Tears,” or something that’s trying to dig into a different part of the ’80s than Chvrches does, those were born from evolving the Chvrches’ live shows. When we started the band, I had only been a drummer in a band, a keyboard player. I hadn’t really fronted a band ever and it took me quite a long time to get comfortable with that.

And on the last Chvrches record (2021’s “Screen Violence”) I was a lot more involved in the creative direction of everything. The visuals and making the live show, not conceptual, but we had costume changes and there was fake blood and quite in-depth video content. When we first started, I didn’t know about any of those things.

So having lived in it long enough, I’ve kind of learned that that kind of world-building is really enjoyable for me. I think it really helps tell the story of your record, and it makes it more fun for the community involved in the band.

Q: And that influenced your solo songs how?

A: I think after about a year and a half of pouring fake blood on myself every night I just have to accept that I like this kind of gothic musical theater (stuff) in a way that I don’t know the guys in the band necessarily do. So when I was thinking about the more character-driven stuff I was like, I want to take those kinds of things and put it in a different context.

Because Chvrches is a very fun experience in a lot of ways but it’s not terribly playful sometimes, I think. In terms of how we create and then how that’s execute it. Maybe it’s a personality thing. You know, Glaswegian men and bands don’t want to dose themselves in glitter and fake blood, and nor should they.

I was like, “I’ll just do this over here for a bit and then we can, yeah, come back together and do things that we all enjoy.”

Q: You’re making me regret not seeing that last tour. I’ve seen Chvrches a few times at Coachella; they were more reserved shows.

A: The fake blood at festivals did confuse people a lot. Because you were washing it off in the sink, in a shared backstage, and sometimes the shared backstage is like VIP tickets as well. So you got a lot of funny looks.

Not something you would expect from a 2010 synth-pop band, and I like that. I feel like that’s going to be our job going forward. How do we push ourselves to not get stuck in that bubble?