CHVRCHES’ lead singer Lauren Mayberry has slammed the misogynist abuse she feels that female artists in the public eye tend to face.

Mayberry, who is gearing up for the release of her band’s second album next month, recently spoke about the subject online when a 4chan community thread in response to the group’s new video ‘Leave A Trace’ provoked a number of misogynist and violent messages. She was invited onto Channel 4 News to discuss the topic on Thursday night (August 27th).

Lauren Mayberry of ChvrchesLauren Mayberry of Chvrches performing in 2014

“I’m a 27-year-old woman wearing a minidress with wet look hair,” she said about the video. “If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but there’s a difference between criticism and hatred… …I hate the idea that young girls who follow our band who deal with stuff like that — I don’t want them to feel isolated, I don’t want them to feel like it’s just happening to them. Because it happens everywhere, and I don’t think the “just ignore it and it’ll go away” argument is working.”

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“It’s always sadly predictable,” the singer continued. “If you don’t like what a woman is doing, you don’t like her opinion, you don’t like what it is that she represents, then you fall back on the basic caveman arguments of threatening with physical and sexual violence, because it’s your trump card, because that’s the way you get somebody to shut up.”

She also doesn’t feel that the common argument, to ‘stop feeding the trolls’, is working at all. “Maybe to an extent, because we’ve spoken out about it more, I paint a target on my back, because people think they’ll get a response. But to me, it’s not necessarily you responding that trolls want. They want to scare and they want to intimidate and they want to silence people. So ignoring it, to me, doesn’t make a difference.”

This is a subject that Mayberry, who was a journalist by trade before getting into the music business, has written about before. In September 2013, she wrote an article in The Guardian saying: “What I do not accept ... is that it is all right for people to make comments ranging from 'a bit sexist but generally harmless' to openly sexually aggressive.”

“That it is something that 'just happens'. Is the casual sexual objectification of women so commonplace that we should all just suck it up, roll over and accept defeat? I hope not. Objectification, whatever its form, is not something anyone should have to 'just deal with'.”

Chvrches' second album Every Open Eye is released on September 25th.

More: Chvrches – ‘Leave A Trace’ [video]