a quick chat with molly rankin from alvvays

In today’s fast-paced digital age, it’s almost a cardinal sin to even think about slowing down. Content is readily available literally by our fingertips, with creatives attempting to keep up with this unrelenting momentum by pumping their work out faster than ever before – after all, why spend time honing in on one song at a time when other artists have released a new album, two singles and a TikTok dance tutorial by the time you’ve finished reading this sentence?

The same can’t be said for beloved indie-pop outfit, Alvvays, however, with their most recent album, Blue Rev, their third LP following their 2014 debut, being the culmination of five years of hard work (not to mention during the pandemic and after several mishaps involving stolen demos and a flood). We were lucky enough to sit down with Molly Rankin, the band’s frontwoman, and chat about the creation of this new record, its inspirations and the importance of taking it slow.

Hi Molly! How are you finding the long trek from Canada to Australia? I’m still acclimating to it all – all of us are in different times still – but we feel like it’s necessary to come here. It’d be so sad if we didn’t!

Your 2014 debut album has become a beloved classic and indie staple since its release. What was it like releasing such a popular first record? I find that very interesting that it seems that way because, at the time, we had a lot of trouble getting airtime. We had so much trouble getting Canadian labels to release our music, and we didn't end up finding anyone. We ended up putting it out on a friend's label. We were lucky to get a US label, but it took so long to get that going and then I feel like the response to the album was a very slow and gradual build. Even though it wasn’t, it probably does seem like it was overnight, especially looking back now.

That first album had a distinct dreamy and mid-century-inspired sound, and Blue Rev by comparison is a lot more abstract and upbeat. How did you all come together to create this particular sound? We made that first album when we were young and we were just trying stuff out and playing around when we recorded the songs. We had no idea what we wanted it to sound like, it just ended up being this soft and pillowy sound really by mistake. So much time has passed since we recorded that, we know we all have different tastes and shifts in our music now, and so we started to become more experimental. It was not a conscious decision to create a distinct sound for Blue Rev, just listening to different stuff led to us trying something new.

We are particularly big fans of “Very Online Guy” from Blue Rev, mostly because we are suckers for synth. What is the message behind this track and what does it mean to you? I’m a big fan of synth too! Because I mostly write on the keyboard it just evolved into this synth sound, and we decided to keep going with that inspiration. It ended up becoming a critique of our modern world and technology, with this idea of letting people know what you’re doing at all times being a popular motif when it comes to other people’s discussions. There’s no shortage of that critique in this song, but we wanted to make it more silly and not as judgemental.

This album also has shoegaze, post-punk, indie and so many other sound references. What was it like packing all these different sounds together? It was a huge task to bring all those different ideas together and make it sound like a cohesive album. There are, as you mentioned, so many different inspirations, moods, personalities and song-writing approaches in Blue Rev, and I was really worried for a long time that we weren't going to be able to have all the songs gel together, but we've always had different sounds in our albums. That's kind of who we've always been, and as long as the song and the melodies hold up, we’ll pack in as much as we can.

Blue Rev was notoriously hard to create, with stolen demos, flooding and the global pandemic acting as stiff roadblocks to get over. What was it like making this album? It’s hard because while I know that we specifically had a hard time, so did everyone else on the planet! So, those other blips that happened to us, like getting broken into or having a flood, seemed like nothing because there was so much going on globally. By the time the album came out, they were all completely different songs to what the original demos were. Making this record was a real uphill battle, but all of us being able to agree on everything made me feel confident that we had surpassed all of the awful stuff that made making it so difficult.

How do you merge your introspective and complex lyrics with such upbeat and poppy sounds? I feel like, sometimes, it's easier to slip in an unhinged persona under the veneer of a shiny pop song, it's kind of a fun challenge to do that. I love finding odd balances in music, like mixing up dark, upbeat and boisterous pop songs with opposing moods. I feel like we're always trying to subvert expectations of what our music is. I have lots of different answers to this question.

Do you ever listen back to older music when you’re writing new tunes? Honestly, I never do that. I kind of find that a bit weird. Because we play live, we’re always listening to our older music, so we don’t have to sit down and dissect it. For me, it's more about trying to break out of those habits and expand my approach to writing songs that are completely different or my approach to hearing sounds.

What’s next on the horizon for you guys? A ton of touring to do, but we've always chipped away at ideas in between those tours. You can never really help when a new idea pops into your mind!