10 Year Anniversary
Alvvays
The self-titled debut record by Canadian band Alvvays (pronounced “always,” to be clear) wastes no time making your heart skip a beat. “Adult Diversion” opens with an off-kilter drum beat dancing with a queasy bassline, lurching like an anxious stomach. It’s followed by a bright, twinking wall of sound that hits like a sudden blush. It’s the sound of a crush; sweet, intoxicating, dizzy and fleeting. Alec O’Hanley’s lead guitar darts around like eyes in a crowd, making way for Molly Rankin’s ghostly drone singing an innocent sounding but sinister story about stalking a passerby on the subway, who may or may not keep a dead girl in a closet. The chorus then counters with preemptive embarrassment, “If I should fall, act as though it never happened/ I will retreat and sit inside very quietly,” as if to undercut her proposal to this imaginary serial killer with a curt “no worries if not.” The song builds to a climactic chant of “I won’t waste a moment,” and finally crashes in a kaleidoscopic wave of washed out fuzz.
It’s a song about projection. It’s about expectations placed on strangers that you, realistically, will never and should never interrupt while they’re going about their day. It’s about the empty feeling left behind when you realize that you’ve spent too much time thinking about someone who has probably never thought about you, and that you have nothing better to do, so you keep doing it. It’s deeply sad, and also pretty funny.
It’s fitting then, that the initial reaction to this record got swept up in a sea of projection and expectations. Their hit single “Archie, Marry Me,” which just hit 100 million streams on Spotify earlier in the year, got all the ink. It’s an earnest, yearning earworm about the liminal space between “together” and “Together”, disguised as a post-ironic shrug about the institution of marriage. It’s a fucking ray of sunshine, a genuine Hit, released at such an opportune time that it seemingly sucked all the air out of the room. In July of 2014, when the record finally released on Polyvinyl, Urban Outfitters vinyl sales were way up (almost exactly one year before Stereogum proclaimed we had hit “peak vinyl”), and “vintage” sounding pop music was so saturated (ha) that Alvvays were easy to rack and file away as one-hit festival hopefuls.
Gareth Campesinos called it “the one bright spot on alternative radio at the time” in an article claiming it as the Song of the Summer (if only). People were falling over calling it a “festival anthem” left and right. “Archie, Marry Me” was a great, if fleeting crush on a band that was having a whole hell of a lot projected onto them because of it. The album scored modestly, many reviews citing washed out production, or just being tired with the rush of navel-gazing, Best Coast ripping, fuzz pop clogging the buzz band pipeline, and didn’t really do much at year-end list time. In October of 2014, I saw them play a modestly full dive bar in Allston, MA (RIP Great Scott) behind an annoyingly cute couple slow dancing and making out through the whole thing (I was in a long-distance relationship at the time…pain.).
The core lineup of Alvvays has always been longtime friends Molly Rankin (vocals, guitar), Alec O’Hanley (guitar), and Kerry McLellan (synth, vocals). Molly and Kerry were childhood best friends who lived in a remote area of Prince Edward Island where they grew up playing and listening to music together, because it was the only thing to do. Molly Rankin is the daughter of John Morris Rankin, the fiddle player of The Rankin Family, a popular Celtic folk group from Nova Scotia, and was a member of the group herself. They met Alec at a concert, and he helped her produce her “She” EP, released in 2010. The next year they left their island homes and moved to Toronto, where they (along with bassist Brian Murphy and drummer Phil MacIssac) formed Alvvays, which added the second “v” out of respect for another Canadian indie pop band named Always signed to Sony (fun fact: when you’re typing “‘Always’ + ‘Canadian band’” on Google, it assumes you’re looking for Alvvays. If you search “‘always’ + ‘sony band’ it throws up a link to an Always Sunny Episode that I would prefer not to type.).
The story goes that, upon moving to Toronto, Molly worked at a Smoothie Hut in an opulent part of the city that had close to zero customers, leading her to assume it was a drug front. This gave her time to write, and the experience of spending all her time alone, watching passersby as a rural transplant in an urban neighborhood came out as 9 searching, sugary, and airtight pop songs all about projection. It’s impossible to overstate the yearning feeling that comes out of these songs. It makes the creepy plot line of “Adult Diversion” seem cute, and the ironic detachment of “Archie, Marry Me” feel like a celebration. They recorded the songs at Chad VanGaalen’s idyllic skatepark/DIY studio in Calgary, who encouraged the band to use unorthodox recording techniques, and embrace technical difficulties. The resulting record sounds out of and of its time.
And so, “Archie, Marry Me” eventually did become a festival anthem, and the fuzz wagon grew steadily over time as the band honed their already considerable chops into efficient C86 surgeons, ripping through 20 song sets in under an hour. That’s when more people started to realize that they had way more than 2 great songs. (Disclaimer: This writer made a shitpost on the late-Blocland.com celebrating the release of their 10th song, “In Undertow” with an article “The 10 Best Alvvays Songs”).
One of the deepest cuts made by Molly’s pen comes on the bridge of the third track “Ones Who Love You,” and goes “When you live on an island, nothing ever falls in place. The winters are violent and you can’t ever feel your face. You can’t fucking feel your face.” It’s a strangely tender sentiment that is both yearning for home and the various ways it makes you suffer, and longing for connection. She’s talking about the physical island just as much about the feeling of moving to a city, not knowing anybody, working a job where you are stuck inside and not interacting with anyone. It’s a vaguely celtic folk-pop daydream about how we tend to mistreat the people who care most about us looking for something else, only to realize the emptiness inherent to the “else.” The next track “Next of Kin” shows the other, darker side of folk songs, and imagines losing a lover dead in the current of a rushing river.
Side B kicks off with “Party Police,” a slow-dancing tear jerker that sings about finding time outside of a party to connect (or break up) with the only person there you really care about. It slowly builds to a heart-stopping voice crack from Molly, and spins off into a psychedelic torrent of melodies from Kerri’s gauzy synthesizer and Alec’s spiraling lead guitar. It transitions into “The Agency Group,” a soaring pop-rock song about making bad decisions because you would rather act on your projections and save face rather than communicate how you feel. “Dives” puts the spotlight on Molly’s voice, backed by a twinkling, swinging guitar arpeggio, leading the listener through a delicate meditation on repetition and failure. “Atop a Cake” feels like a callback to “Archie, Marry Me” and continues the story of the lovers who decided to say “fuck it” and get married, only to realize that means you have to live with that person every day.
In the final song, “Red Planet,” the rest of the band drop out for Molly to sing from space, post breakup, under a blanket of drones from Kerri, which she hangs on the song like a fuzzy blanket after a good cry. The detachment has grown to the point where Molly sings as if she were on Mars. “Well I waited for you out here, but that was just delusional. And I painted all these pictures of Earth, but that’s unusual to you.” What a downer! The end result is a record that hits like the feel good and feel bad hit of the summer at the same time. It’s sunrise and dusk in equal measure for the time when you feel “too late to go out, too young to stay in” and start to realize that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to settle down and be boring now.
Alvvays toured the hell out of this record, and the hype gained steam. Towards the end of 2014, they began padding out their setlist with new songs, like “Your Type,” “New Haircut” (which later became “Saved By a Waif”), and “Dreams Tonite” teasing their follow up record Antisocialites which released on Polyvinyl in 2017. That record performed about as well critically (that’s to say, a single thumbs up) but continued to find new fans (where were you when Kendall Jenner posted “Dreams Tonite” on her Instagram story?). That was followed by “Blue Rev” in 2022, which topped a ton of year end lists, and cemented their legacy as pop-rock perfectionists. But when I saw them play that year, the songs that made the crowd lose their minds the most came from this record (Specifically “Ones Who Love You” and “Next of Kin”, the latter starting a small mosh pit… which? Lol.). Their unassuming, blown out, ironically detached feel-good-bummer of a debut record, built on the strength of 9 perfect songs. - Pads