"No one's really successfully told me what to do," Molly Rankin tells me, before humbly clarifying that it's "not exactly a flex."
There are pros and cons to being left to your own devices — and that's certainly the case for the Toronto-based singer-songwriter's staunch vision for her band Alvvays.
"It's not that people haven't expressed certain inclinations to go in a more palatable direction," she says during a call with Exclaim! "I just never really listen to anyone." Of her refusal to evolve the band's sound to be more radio-friendly, she adds, "I know that the synthpop thing is sort of a typical path to go down, but I don't really like super glossy-sounding music that sounds expensive and perfect."
Still, she attests Alvvays never made a conscious decision to make Blue Rev, their long-awaited third LP, "louder or harsher or more experimental," as she puts it. And sure, their longest record yet — out October 7, following their longest gap between album cycles — is all of those things, but it's also their best, most exciting work to date.
There's been ample time for that excitement to build since their sophomore record Antisocialites came out in 2017 and was named Exclaim!'s favourite pop and rock album of that year. "I don't know how I objectively view the band and the trajectory and what people feel about certain records," Rankin says of the reception of Antisocialities.
"I know that our shows got a lot bigger," she laughs. "But other than that, I've never specifically felt like we were sitting pretty on the top of a critical heap at all."
The only pressure she's felt to deliver a follow-up of a certain calibre comes from expectations of her own, and guitarist Alec O'Hanley's. "Alec and I are very hard on one another when it comes to what we think is good enough, so lots of things get edited and chopped up," Rankin says. But opinions external to the band have never really been relevant to them: "If [the response is] good, then great. And if it's, you know, tepid, that's fine too; I think we'll still continue to strive for just kind of making things that move you and finding those emotional lifts."
She continues, "I think the one thing we can agree on — like everyone in the band — is just that we love loud guitars. And we love the conversation between my vocal and Alec's guitar, and Kerri [MacLellan] has got this sort of like, warm blanket of synth that seems to connect everything in a way that just can't really be replicated." This is the core trio that Alvvays has always been: Rankin's incandescent voice and O'Hanley's fluid arpeggios, harmonizing disparately until the gravitational force of MacLellan's swathes of synth pulls them into the same pocket.
Now with the addition of longtime touring drummer Sheridan Riley and new bassist Abbey Blackwell, who had been rooming with Riley in Seattle and made her live debut with Alvvays at an arena gig opening for the Strokes, they've embarked on a collective mission to do the opposite of sticking to their guns: the band set out to break the patterns they had created with their previous approaches to making a record.
Rankin describes herself and her bandmates as "borderline control freaks." She says, "Relinquishing any of that is difficult for us, in every respect of the band."
Sometimes, though, she didn't have any choice but to let things go: like when the recorder filled with her earliest post-Antisocialites demos was stolen from her apartment — the day before a basement flood nearly ruined all of the band's gear.
"At the time, it was really upsetting," she says of the break-in, a twofold trespass since the thief took a compilation of "extremely sensitive work." She affirms, "I mean, so much time has passed now, and the songs have taken on so many different lives, it's hard to imagine what would have been missed or replaced or changed, had I had the chance to comb through all of that more."
Still, she isn't quite at the phase of looking back on it as some necessary act of cosmic intervention yet: "It's just like a tiny little door in my brain that probably never closed."
Much of that material, in some shape or form, does appear on Blue Rev, regardless. "Thankfully, the way I write melodies is usually when I'm walking around Toronto or in sort of an inconvenient place," she says of her process. "And I've learned that the best ones, you don't forget. So a lot of that stuff is already imprinted in my brain before I'm putting it down."
Knowing when to take a leap of faith is difficult for any artist, but Rankin says Alvvays were ready to try new things this time around. While the band are notorious for carefully plotting their demos, Calgary-born producer Shawn Everett (Kacey Musgraves, the War on Drugs) convinced them to throw their plans out the window last October when they got into the studio together in Los Angeles. They played the songs straight to tape, going through the album front-to-back twice, with 15-second intervals between tracks and a 30-minute break between the pair of takes. Alongside Everett, the band went on to devote their penchant for the meticulous to spending hours upon hours coarsening the tracks' surfaces, saturating every shade and tone in the mix.
Despite the stolen recorder and the economical amount of takes, Rankin's "unhinged" vocal on "Pomeranian Spinster" was recorded at a shed practice session. "That is just me kind of freestyling gibberish, and we weren't really able to replicate that energy in any other scenario," she explains. Even if you don't know a local pup who isn't keen on men, "Very Online Guy" presents an undoubtedly familiar character — you can practically hear the maniacal typing, low chuckling and laser-tag pews folded into the track's low-end frequencies.
Even at their thorniest, Rankin's lyrics still read like poetry with their wry wit and conscious consonance. Eschewing overarching narrative, the songs feel more connected by repeated imagery and words — hallway rackets and monochromatics; velvet falls and curtain draws. Appropriately, the record's summarizing centrepiece, "After the Earthquake," was directly inspired by Haruki Murakami's short story collection After the Quake. "It's referencing this historical earthquake, and that's a central theme in all the stories," Rankin interprets. "But it's sort of just, like, this looming thing in that background that is subconsciously bringing up all of these pivots in these people's lives."
There's an obvious analogue here to the indelible impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, especially now that most governing bodies have moved on to the "post-pandemic" phase of trying to pretend we're beyond it. The way life has changed since early 2020 has been another key factor in convincing Alvvays to surrender their old ways. "When you realize that you have such little control over certain vital parts of life, it's humbling," says the singer-songwriter.
Blue Rev's dominant motif could be said to hang in the liminal betweenness of waiting. "The song where I say 'always waiting' like 40 times?" Rankin remarks dryly of "Bored in Bristol," before adding in earnest, "There was a long period of time in the last couple of years where we were waiting to find out what was going to happen to anyone."
Of "After the Earthquake," she adds, "There are all of these outside elements … running through the song, but the main thing is that this person is really hung up on what is going to happen with their relationship." Over a shatterproof groove and pulsing kicks sure to register on the Richter scale, the three-minute psychodrama narrates a cryptic car accident straight out of an episode of Murder, She Wrote — ironically, with a post-chorus riff where Rankin says she was trying to channel proto-punk band Television.
"I'll sleep better knowing it's in the past," she sings on "Tom Verlaine," the track that immediately proceeds it, named for the Television bandleader. "He also has a song called 'Always,' so we just thought it was a good opportunity," Rankin points out. "That was the final piece of the puzzle, that line that he was brought up. We've fussed with a lot of different titles, but it just felt kind of fearless to just name names."
And they do it again on "Belinda Says," paying homage to Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" (and adding, "Well, so is hell"). That lyric was O'Hanley's idea, and Rankin likens it to the unlocking of "Tom Verlaine." She recalls, "Getting that piece of the puzzle right at the peak of the song was a crucial sign of progress for us. It was a huge relief to just put the lyric binder back into the bookshelf after that was finished."
Even if previous nods to reference points left auteurs anonymous, Alvvays have always come by their timelessness honestly, bringing together elements from new wave and twee C86-era jangle pop to the murky, mercurial textures of '90s shoegaze and late-aughts lo-fi. It was slightly in between those final two epochs, in the year 2000, when Rev — a caffeine-infused vodka cooler from the makers of Bacardi — was "all the rage," according to an article by TMU's independent student newspaper The Eyeopener.
Only available in Canada, the electric blue beverage contains seven percent alcohol, as well as the guarana herb native to South America's Amazon basin, a stimulant with twice the caffeine concentration found in coffee beans.
"I was trying to channel something in the realm of strawberry wine, where you just think of an iconic drink of the past," Rankin explains.
"Even just to try to envision it can just trigger all of these different elements of the things you went through," Rankin says of the album's namesake, a hallmark of her youth in Nova Scotia with longtime bandmate MacLellan, sipped on in graveyards and at hockey rink dances after being carried around in somebody's brother's backpack all day. "Had I not been, like, 16, I don't know if it would be sustainable," she says of the depressant-stimulant cocktail and the gnarly hangover she's sure it would give her now. "And I used to be such a tank in that regard!"
She continues, "I've never really touched on living in the Maritimes that much, so I did see it as kind of an opportunity to play with some of the unique cultural aspects of growing up in Cape Breton, and the different traditions and habits that we all kind of embodied at the time without questioning whether or not that was, like, common practice."
So even if Blue Rev represents a futuristic iteration of Alvvays set on shirking their own album-making methodology, it is an inherently nostalgic way of looking forward.
"Now that we've passed through many mirrors / I can't believe we're still the same," repeats the hook of the sweet, sweeping love song "Many Mirrors," which feels like a perfectly autobiographical reflection on the band's history — whether or not it actually is.
"I never thought that we would be touring the world — or that people in, for instance, Berlin, would be listening to our songs," Rankin admits. "It's all been more than we ever expected."
She reflects, "It can be very disappointing if you have some kind of grand expectation of what music will do for your life."
The same could be said for the one-two punch of an alcoholic energy drink, but it might be worthy of an opus all the same.
There are pros and cons to being left to your own devices — and that's certainly the case for the Toronto-based singer-songwriter's staunch vision for her band Alvvays.
"It's not that people haven't expressed certain inclinations to go in a more palatable direction," she says during a call with Exclaim! "I just never really listen to anyone." Of her refusal to evolve the band's sound to be more radio-friendly, she adds, "I know that the synthpop thing is sort of a typical path to go down, but I don't really like super glossy-sounding music that sounds expensive and perfect."
Still, she attests Alvvays never made a conscious decision to make Blue Rev, their long-awaited third LP, "louder or harsher or more experimental," as she puts it. And sure, their longest record yet — out October 7, following their longest gap between album cycles — is all of those things, but it's also their best, most exciting work to date.
There's been ample time for that excitement to build since their sophomore record Antisocialites came out in 2017 and was named Exclaim!'s favourite pop and rock album of that year. "I don't know how I objectively view the band and the trajectory and what people feel about certain records," Rankin says of the reception of Antisocialities.
"I know that our shows got a lot bigger," she laughs. "But other than that, I've never specifically felt like we were sitting pretty on the top of a critical heap at all."
The only pressure she's felt to deliver a follow-up of a certain calibre comes from expectations of her own, and guitarist Alec O'Hanley's. "Alec and I are very hard on one another when it comes to what we think is good enough, so lots of things get edited and chopped up," Rankin says. But opinions external to the band have never really been relevant to them: "If [the response is] good, then great. And if it's, you know, tepid, that's fine too; I think we'll still continue to strive for just kind of making things that move you and finding those emotional lifts."
She continues, "I think the one thing we can agree on — like everyone in the band — is just that we love loud guitars. And we love the conversation between my vocal and Alec's guitar, and Kerri [MacLellan] has got this sort of like, warm blanket of synth that seems to connect everything in a way that just can't really be replicated." This is the core trio that Alvvays has always been: Rankin's incandescent voice and O'Hanley's fluid arpeggios, harmonizing disparately until the gravitational force of MacLellan's swathes of synth pulls them into the same pocket.
Now with the addition of longtime touring drummer Sheridan Riley and new bassist Abbey Blackwell, who had been rooming with Riley in Seattle and made her live debut with Alvvays at an arena gig opening for the Strokes, they've embarked on a collective mission to do the opposite of sticking to their guns: the band set out to break the patterns they had created with their previous approaches to making a record.
Rankin describes herself and her bandmates as "borderline control freaks." She says, "Relinquishing any of that is difficult for us, in every respect of the band."
Sometimes, though, she didn't have any choice but to let things go: like when the recorder filled with her earliest post-Antisocialites demos was stolen from her apartment — the day before a basement flood nearly ruined all of the band's gear.
"At the time, it was really upsetting," she says of the break-in, a twofold trespass since the thief took a compilation of "extremely sensitive work." She affirms, "I mean, so much time has passed now, and the songs have taken on so many different lives, it's hard to imagine what would have been missed or replaced or changed, had I had the chance to comb through all of that more."
Still, she isn't quite at the phase of looking back on it as some necessary act of cosmic intervention yet: "It's just like a tiny little door in my brain that probably never closed."
Much of that material, in some shape or form, does appear on Blue Rev, regardless. "Thankfully, the way I write melodies is usually when I'm walking around Toronto or in sort of an inconvenient place," she says of her process. "And I've learned that the best ones, you don't forget. So a lot of that stuff is already imprinted in my brain before I'm putting it down."
Knowing when to take a leap of faith is difficult for any artist, but Rankin says Alvvays were ready to try new things this time around. While the band are notorious for carefully plotting their demos, Calgary-born producer Shawn Everett (Kacey Musgraves, the War on Drugs) convinced them to throw their plans out the window last October when they got into the studio together in Los Angeles. They played the songs straight to tape, going through the album front-to-back twice, with 15-second intervals between tracks and a 30-minute break between the pair of takes. Alongside Everett, the band went on to devote their penchant for the meticulous to spending hours upon hours coarsening the tracks' surfaces, saturating every shade and tone in the mix.
Despite the stolen recorder and the economical amount of takes, Rankin's "unhinged" vocal on "Pomeranian Spinster" was recorded at a shed practice session. "That is just me kind of freestyling gibberish, and we weren't really able to replicate that energy in any other scenario," she explains. Even if you don't know a local pup who isn't keen on men, "Very Online Guy" presents an undoubtedly familiar character — you can practically hear the maniacal typing, low chuckling and laser-tag pews folded into the track's low-end frequencies.
Even at their thorniest, Rankin's lyrics still read like poetry with their wry wit and conscious consonance. Eschewing overarching narrative, the songs feel more connected by repeated imagery and words — hallway rackets and monochromatics; velvet falls and curtain draws. Appropriately, the record's summarizing centrepiece, "After the Earthquake," was directly inspired by Haruki Murakami's short story collection After the Quake. "It's referencing this historical earthquake, and that's a central theme in all the stories," Rankin interprets. "But it's sort of just, like, this looming thing in that background that is subconsciously bringing up all of these pivots in these people's lives."
There's an obvious analogue here to the indelible impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, especially now that most governing bodies have moved on to the "post-pandemic" phase of trying to pretend we're beyond it. The way life has changed since early 2020 has been another key factor in convincing Alvvays to surrender their old ways. "When you realize that you have such little control over certain vital parts of life, it's humbling," says the singer-songwriter.
Blue Rev's dominant motif could be said to hang in the liminal betweenness of waiting. "The song where I say 'always waiting' like 40 times?" Rankin remarks dryly of "Bored in Bristol," before adding in earnest, "There was a long period of time in the last couple of years where we were waiting to find out what was going to happen to anyone."
Of "After the Earthquake," she adds, "There are all of these outside elements … running through the song, but the main thing is that this person is really hung up on what is going to happen with their relationship." Over a shatterproof groove and pulsing kicks sure to register on the Richter scale, the three-minute psychodrama narrates a cryptic car accident straight out of an episode of Murder, She Wrote — ironically, with a post-chorus riff where Rankin says she was trying to channel proto-punk band Television.
"I'll sleep better knowing it's in the past," she sings on "Tom Verlaine," the track that immediately proceeds it, named for the Television bandleader. "He also has a song called 'Always,' so we just thought it was a good opportunity," Rankin points out. "That was the final piece of the puzzle, that line that he was brought up. We've fussed with a lot of different titles, but it just felt kind of fearless to just name names."
And they do it again on "Belinda Says," paying homage to Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" (and adding, "Well, so is hell"). That lyric was O'Hanley's idea, and Rankin likens it to the unlocking of "Tom Verlaine." She recalls, "Getting that piece of the puzzle right at the peak of the song was a crucial sign of progress for us. It was a huge relief to just put the lyric binder back into the bookshelf after that was finished."
Even if previous nods to reference points left auteurs anonymous, Alvvays have always come by their timelessness honestly, bringing together elements from new wave and twee C86-era jangle pop to the murky, mercurial textures of '90s shoegaze and late-aughts lo-fi. It was slightly in between those final two epochs, in the year 2000, when Rev — a caffeine-infused vodka cooler from the makers of Bacardi — was "all the rage," according to an article by TMU's independent student newspaper The Eyeopener.
Only available in Canada, the electric blue beverage contains seven percent alcohol, as well as the guarana herb native to South America's Amazon basin, a stimulant with twice the caffeine concentration found in coffee beans.
"I was trying to channel something in the realm of strawberry wine, where you just think of an iconic drink of the past," Rankin explains.
"Even just to try to envision it can just trigger all of these different elements of the things you went through," Rankin says of the album's namesake, a hallmark of her youth in Nova Scotia with longtime bandmate MacLellan, sipped on in graveyards and at hockey rink dances after being carried around in somebody's brother's backpack all day. "Had I not been, like, 16, I don't know if it would be sustainable," she says of the depressant-stimulant cocktail and the gnarly hangover she's sure it would give her now. "And I used to be such a tank in that regard!"
She continues, "I've never really touched on living in the Maritimes that much, so I did see it as kind of an opportunity to play with some of the unique cultural aspects of growing up in Cape Breton, and the different traditions and habits that we all kind of embodied at the time without questioning whether or not that was, like, common practice."
So even if Blue Rev represents a futuristic iteration of Alvvays set on shirking their own album-making methodology, it is an inherently nostalgic way of looking forward.
"Now that we've passed through many mirrors / I can't believe we're still the same," repeats the hook of the sweet, sweeping love song "Many Mirrors," which feels like a perfectly autobiographical reflection on the band's history — whether or not it actually is.
"I never thought that we would be touring the world — or that people in, for instance, Berlin, would be listening to our songs," Rankin admits. "It's all been more than we ever expected."
She reflects, "It can be very disappointing if you have some kind of grand expectation of what music will do for your life."
The same could be said for the one-two punch of an alcoholic energy drink, but it might be worthy of an opus all the same.