On the ferry ride back to the city during Toronto’s last week of broiling weather, Alvvays’ guitarist Alec O’Hanley extols the virtues of the quaint video game Stardew Valley. With wide-eyed reverence, he explains how the farm simulator’s creator developed its catchily pastoral soundtrack, cottagey graphics, and immersive concept on his own over four years, an eternity by today’s content creation standards. The other two band members on the boat, frontwoman Molly Rankin and keyboardist Kerri MacLellan—childhood partners-in-crime—are also fans of the game, in which players discover they’ve inherited farmland from their grandfather and must figure out what to do with the legacy. It’s a pleasant escape from life’s chaos, they say, much like the serenity of the Toronto Islands, a quiet haven 13 minutes from downtown to which residents flock throughout the warm months to shake off their cabin fever.
After a day spent eating grapes on the beach there, the three enlighten me as to the magic of a wholesome video game in which no one dies and everyone cultivates their own vegetable crops. There’s no real end to Stardew Valley; fulfillment comes from exploration, not superiority.
That the Canadian critical darlings would find solace in a soothing rejection of scorekeeping aligns with where they currently find themselves more than a decade after forming. In repose on the island, inboxes ignored as they pile with press requests and tour logistics, Alvvays are one month away from releasing their third album, Blue Rev, a prodigious feat of hard-earned intricacies that puts a jet pack on their unerring ascent.
In 2014, Alvvays’ self-titled debut shot Rankin’s voice into the consciousness of indie rock, her softly sung allegories declaring searing profundities and blunt propositions, while the band’s boppy compositions swerved toward post-punk despondence. The album’s lead single, “Archie, Marry Me,” critiqued the conventions of modern love, becoming an anthem of sorts for people who didn’t want to get married but also didn’t want to be alone.
Three years later, with Antisocialites, Rankin became even more respected as a purveyor of scathing lullabies, sweetly ethering with lyrics like, “You’re the seashell in my sandal that’s slicing up my heel,” one of many lines in Alvvays lore that salutes the three original members’ Canadian East Coast upbringings. (Newer additions Abbey Blackwell and Sheridan Riley hail from America’s West Coast.) Like their first record, Antisocialites was shortlisted for Canada’s revered Polaris Music Prize. It also won the Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year, suggesting that Alvvays would do well to keep sounding like Alvvays.
When COVID hit in March 2020, the band was on tour with the Strokes. “We were in catering, and they started putting the cutlery the other way up,” says Rankin, recalling the slapstick safety practices of the pandemic’s early days. “I was just thinking, We as a society are not ready for this.” As they were set to play Los Angeles and begin work on their next album, the rest of the tour was postponed. With pent-up momentum and nowhere to record, they flew home to Toronto, where a backyard shed became their makeshift atelier.
The unplanned time off allowed Alvvays’ members, now in their 30s, to pause and consider how they wanted their next album to sound. They moved slowly through daydreams of possibilities, ridding themselves of pressures they no longer wanted to carry. For Rankin, those considerations included the matter of her own legacy—as Canadians will suspect from last name alone, she is a child of storied folk group the Rankin Family, whose Celtic-inspired style and sentimental harmonies are a cherished part of Canadian music history. Her father, John Morris Rankin, who tragically died in a car crash in 2000, was a founding member.
“We started thinking about escaping expectations—of what we sound like, what we need to sound like, what people think we sound like, what we think we sound like,” says Rankin. “That all fell by the wayside, and we became free to explore different ideas. We played around with leaving things in that were louder and stranger than we would have kept in the past.”
The result of the band’s introspective pandemic period isn’t a detour, but a collage of various temperaments, an evolution of expression. The songs on Blue Rev stretch into the cobwebby corners of messy experiences, musically traversing a gauntlet of moods and intensities. “After the Earthquake” jangles awake before blowing out into a gloriously boisterous pop-rock odyssey, abruptly pausing to ensure the listener really hears Rankin’s verisimilitude as she sings with wisened dejection, “Why would I ever fall in love again, when every detail is over the guardrail?” On “Very Online Guy,” MacLellan’s turbulent keys haul Rankin’s voice across a trenchant scrutiny of digital era dynamics. “Bored in Bristol” finds Rankin dabbling in a position of lyrical subservience, a far cry from the sagacity of “Pharmacist” or the dispirited pleas of “Lottery Noises.”
“It’s important to me to embrace all the different parts of one’s personality, whether or not they’re pleasant,” says Rankin, “and to not be overly concerned with the perception of the phases that we go through—regret, annoyance, reeling.”
The band realized that quality will tolerate experimentation—that truly good songs will survive unconventional approaches, uncharted tactics, even failures. This released Alvvays from limitation, allowing them to evolve from techniques that had previously guaranteed success.
After lockdown lifted, Alvvays hunkered down with Grammy-winning producer Shawn Everett, whose resume includes work with Adele, Kacey Musgraves, Big Thief, the Killers, and Kesha. “Everyone was into the smallest details, in an intense way—that may sound like other people’s nightmare, but that’s my heaven,” says Everett, who notes that he bought a Rankin Family album in the fifth grade. “Sometimes you feel the energy of people just wanting to have their album out, because it’s a reason to tour, but Alvvays really appreciated the craft of it, like a painting. They wanted to get it done correctly, not immediately.”
Everett reveled in the possibilities that arose from the band’s open-minded ethos. He decided to run the tracks through a finicky tape machine that was technically broken, but produced a sound he liked. “Every time I’d print a mix it would sound slightly different—it was an excruciating process,” he says. “But I always try to have one chaotic aspect that is outside my control, so I’m not just working into my own thoughts. It’s good to have something that fucks with you a little bit.”
Or a lot. Deep into the process, the band learned the vinyl pressing plant’s hard deadline was days away, forcing them to wrap urgently if they wanted a physical record produced within the year. The band stayed up for days with Everett, trying to remain detail-oriented while the clock ticked and lucidity waned. “It was hell on earth,” the producer says. “Horrible. Truly awful.”
After a sleepless home stretch in which big decisions were made in zombie-like states, the band’s valiant attempt at a gentle pace in tatters, they finally finished Blue Rev around 8 a.m. the day of the deadline, and immediately delivered the album to the pressing plant.
It’s during fraught moments like these that Rankin feels closest to her family’s musical legacy. “People usually focus on the success and comfort that comes from having a catalog of familiar songs, but there were very challenging times,” she says of the Rankin Family’s history. “They sold records out of the trunks of cars for years, and there was a lot of hardship and tragedy. When I was a teenager it wasn’t something I would willingly put on, because it felt like everyone’s reference to who I was. But now when I hear their music, it’s very beautiful, and I enjoy it.” At the island, when O’Hanley’s speaker, nestled in the sand on shuffle, starts one of her family’s songs, Rankin seems pleasantly surprised: “Are you putting on Rankin Family?” Shortly after, she goes for a solo dip in Lake Ontario.
Blue Rev is lovingly named after the candy-sweet vodka cooler Rankin and MacLellan drank as teens in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. As the pair reminisce about getting tipsy behind ice rinks and in graveyards, there’s an undertone of solemnity. The memory and longevity intertwined with the title hold some grief. Rankin and MacLellan went to a lot of funerals as kids; the cover of the album features a childhood photograph of Rankin and her parents, Rankin looking adorably venturesome in a lifejacket as she climbs toward her dad.
“We did want Blue Rev to be in the ‘Strawberry Wine’ vein, where you’re transported into this other era by taking a sip of something,” says Rankin, referring to country singer Deana Carter’s bittersweetly nostalgic song. “You end up reliving things that play a role in your life whether or not you want them to.” “Pharmacist,” says Rankin, is about finding forgiveness and closing a chapter. “I was thinking about the realization that where you come from will never really be the same. I just thought it was this heavy-beautiful blend of moving on for yourself, making peace with it all to come out on the other side in a better way.”
O’Hanley adds, “There’s a sensory thing that gets tied up in the inflection point between childhood and adulthood. There’s a lot of power there, and vulnerability. You can really spiral off in several directions from that point, but there’s a universality that people recognize.”
In that universality, the band has figured out, is a sly invitation for straight men to enter the Alvvays arena through the guise of fuzzy rock songs—then stay for the teary catharsis. The members of Alvvays aren’t on any kind of mission to make men cry, but looking out at their audiences, they’ve seen how their songs neutralize emotionality among the sorts of indie rock guys you’d expect to be too cool.
“There’s footage of the Smiths playing some crazy soccer stadium, with all these teenage boys singing the most tender lyrics at the top of their lungs. That would be the way we try to integrate and subvert, by exposing dudes to sensitivity,” says O’Hanley. “Pile enough distortion on and it becomes a truck they want to get in the front seat of.”
“I’ve seen several hundred men sing the words of ‘Not My Baby’ at a show,” says Rankin, of an Alvvays breakup song written from the brink of saddened peace. “It is pretty fulfilling to see that. It’s nice that the world’s idea of rock is expanding.”
Rankin and the other members of Alvvays became unwittingly associated with rock’s misogyny problem in 2017, when a video of an audience member in Antwerp, Belgium storming the stage and attempting to kiss her as she performed spread online. Rankin dodged the intruder, and he walked off the stage. It wasn’t the first, or last, time that has happened. “I didn’t really get a chance to react,” she says. “You don’t choose how you react. Looking back I would have done something differently.” (“It is in no way, shape or form acceptable to harass women on or off stage,” the venue’s director wrote in a statement following the incident. “We apologize to the band and audience that this happened on our watch. This was not OK.”)
Not far from the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, the oldest one on the Great Lakes, I ask Rankin, wrapped in a Cape Breton flag towel as waves creep up the shore, what pushes her songwriting forward. “Does this move me? Do I believe me?” she answers, explaining the questions against which she considers the viability of songs-in-progress. “Is this an expansion of things we’ve done?”
As a songwriter, Rankin approaches lyrics like a novelist, again looking for universality in emotional landscapes of her own design, imagining characters and situations as vessels for storytelling. “I channel my feelings into little universes and create different scenarios based on those feelings. I’ve never written directly about my interactions with people,” she says. “I make movies in my head.” It’s fitting that when we talk about the album title, O’Hanley points out there’s room for interpretation in that, too. The idea of a cerulean blue vodka cooler may not resonate with everyone, but Blue Rev could also mean a dream—rêve, in French.
A few minutes’ walk from our spot in the sand is a cluster of cabins used for artist residencies. Before the pandemic, Rankin hauled her gear there in a wheelbarrow, settling in for early Blue Rev writing sessions. “Toronto is great, but there’s a lot going on all the time, it’s hard to focus,” she says. “It’s fun to turn all the lights off and be detached.”
Tucked away in the trees, she began to write, the island’s environs showing up subtly in lyrics referencing swimming, the sunrise, and the breeze. When not toiling inside her quiet retreat, Rankin would wander the shoreline collecting beach glass—tossed away shards that tumbled around Lake Ontario for years, becoming smooth cyan charms in the calamity of the tides, proof that patience has a purpose.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mistakenly stated that Alvvays recorded Blue Rev in Los Angeles’ Sunset Sound studio. They had intended to work there but ultimately recorded the album in producer Shawn Everett’s studio instead.
