Alvvays – Blue Rev (2022)

Rankin credits Alvvays guitarist Alec O’Hanley for kickstarting her new musical direction by introducing her to Teenage Fanclub years before they would form a band together. Their new album, Blue Rev, turns up the distortion and juxtaposes Rankin’s crisp vocals and sweet melodies with a wall of heavier guitars for the first time, something they’ve been experimenting with in their live sets for a couple years. She met keyboardist Kerri MacLellan even earlier – the two were next-door neighbours, and attended kindergarten together.

“I’m not sure if we were friends by choice, we were the babies of each family that lived on our dirt road, so we were basically what was left over. We have a treasure trove of hilarious photographs of us doing all sorts of ridiculous things with our dolls,” she says. “Both of our families were heavily into Celtic music, so we were spending a lot of our childhood going to square dances and dancing with elderly people – we spent years playing the fiddle alongside each other.”

Eventually, the two moved to Toronto, Rankin booked a solo gig at SXSW and convinced her friend to accompany her on the keyboard, from which a lasting musical partnership was born. With their new project, however, the band’s typical flair for the vintage took a bit more of a personal turn, Rankin wanting to infuse their themes of the fleeting beauty of youthfulness with some Nova Scotian specificity. She’s always described the striking cliffs as an inspiration, and the album’s title takes its name from a vodka soda cooler that she calls “the taste of my youth.”

“It’s a drink that was handed around in the graveyards before teen dances. It was generally warm, the flavour was blue, and that’s all we could get our hands on, I guess,” she says. “I think the culture of having a dance in a melted ice rink is fairly unique as well.”

“I think the culture of having a dance in a melted ice rink is fairly unique as well.”

From putting out their debut project on cassette tapes to a celebrated video for 2017 single “Dreams Tonite” that found the band inserting themselves into archival footage from Montreal’s Expo 67, a retro kick has always been part of the band’s oeuvre. For narratives surrounding Rankin’s childhood, that means taking things back to the vibrant hues and 8-bit aesthetics of the 1990s.

“There is so much charm to be gleaned from the past, whether that’s colour palettes or the way that film looks,” she says. “I think it’s exciting to not be linked to any era, to just have this indeterminate time. You’re not tethered to a scene or a trend. I’m really just trying to make something beautiful, and that could be a melody, a poster, or whatever. I just like colour too, and a lot of things these days just look like gray Lego assembled.”

The video for their latest single “Belinda Says” even gives a shoutout to Canadian music video mecca MuchMusic, which Rankin says she watched religiously before school. Lyrically, the single focuses on a narrator panicking about an unexpected pregnancy, seemingly addressing the climate of post-Roe America. The horrors of our modern world are another reason why Rankin enjoys looking to the past – a quote from a 2018 interview where Rankin said “The future is pretty bleak. Going backward can be comforting” seems oddly prophetic to this album’s fascination with home’s familiarity.

“Knowing what we know now, I don’t know what I was complaining about,” she says.

While some details that couldn’t come from anyone but a Cape Breton native make it into the album, “Belinda Says” also continues Rankin’s focus on character work, rather than getting explicitly personal. Her lyrics seem deep, cryptic, and allusive, and their fans love to draw connections and come up with theories online as a result. The fact that they’re often off-base just speaks to how well-written her songs are – they’d have to be, to inspire such creative discussions. Rankin is often reluctant to reveal the truth because she finds the theories so entertaining.

“Sometimes people ask me these questions about the depth of something and they’ve gone so much further than I was going, it almost makes me feel bad,” she says. “But that’s the cool part of music, everyone taking their own little meanings. I don’t feel like I’m that interesting and I feel like my life is a little mundane, so becoming a character has been a way for me to explore different universes, creating little books and films in my spare time.”

Alvvays’ new sound might take a little time for some fans to get used to after breaking out onto the scene with dreamier soundscapes, but Rankin says that a third album is always a good time for a band to push themselves out of the comfort zone – and rest assured, her perfectionist tendencies, five-year gestation period, and ear for the sweetest of melodies that still bubble up underneath make it just as worthwhile.

“I just really didn’t feel bound by any type of template, and I just wanted to challenge myself and strive for something more,” she says. “I’m very hard on myself, and I’m picky with melodies, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Ideally, things would come out more quickly, but I’ve never put anything out that I felt like I didn’t do everything I could to make it exactly how we wanted it.”