In our latest Digital Cover Story, Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley trace their band’s first decade together, from their 2022 triumph Blue Rev all the way back to their eponymous debut, which turns 10 today.
The second verse of “Adult Diversion” begins with a question. Through a Coke bottle-clear intensity, Molly Rankin sings: “How do I grow old with you?” Barely in her mid-twenties then, Rankin yearned for the kind of future the rest of us yearn for, too—just seven words wrapped around the curves of a question mark, delivered sugarly while Rankin and her bandmates coast along to jangle-pop riffs and the sun-soaked twee of a throbbing bassline. I love the second verse of “Adult Diversion” because its question does not demand an immediate answer from us. It’s all talk—a talk that sounds like a song playing on repeat, like ocean crests hugging ankles beneath rolled pant legs, like the intimacy of a long, winding car ride to nowhere in particular and everywhere all at once. Those seven words are purposeful but not overstated, dressed up in the unpredictability of a journey rather than the finality of a destination. And on October 28th, 2013, so many of us heard those words for the very first time.
And then there was that album cover—a photo of Iranian school girls at a monarch birthday celebration, originally published by National Geographic. There are at least two-dozen bodies in the image, yet only a handful are looking directly at the camera. It’s strange yet phenomenal, plumed with a palette of blues, reds and yellows that would follow Rankin’s wardrobe and aesthetic for years. “The first time I saw it, I just instantly knew that it had to be the cover,” she says, “and nothing else even came close. Four people are looking into the camera, but everyone else is in their own headspace. It feels like it fits perfectly with the album, in a strange way. Hunting for that feeling is not always successful or rewarding, but when it does come across, it’s really satisfying. Sometimes you come up with nothing, constantly looking for that image that makes sense. I don’t know what this cover makes me feel. It just feels right.”
The Alvvays cover and the aesthetics of the “Archie, Marry Me” and “Adult Diversion” music videos—which would carry over into the “In Undertow” and “Dreams Tonite” music videos three years later—are a prismatic marriage of the way Rankin and her bandmate Alec O’Hanley interpret their surroundings. It’s the saturation and the color and the embodiment of indescribable feelings without directly referencing specific. It can mean anything to anyone. Rankin hails from Cape Breton, an island in Nova Scotia, and the Highlands haunt Alvvays’ catalog. “During the summer, take me sailing out on the Atlantic,” she sang 10 years ago. “I won’t set my sights on other seas.” “Getting on the last freight, I’m leaving in a fog,” she conceded eight years later. “It’s been so long since we spent any significant time there, but it is a cultural anomaly to me,” Rankin says. “The way that people speak and the culture there—it’s just vastly different from living in a city. The community and the winters being as isolating as they are, the ocean being a constant presence and then, now, feeling far away from that—it’s all just one big stew of longing.”
A decade of plunking choruses and decamping to Toronto after deciding to give the whole band thing a go, and Rankin still has a hankering for half-masts and that doomy, beautiful, disruptive coastline that often galvanizes her lyricism—character studies buzzing with sentimentality and crushing, maybe-personal woes delivered through a vocal that could, in one moment, sound like a hazy, unfurling wail and then, seconds later, laugh at all of your jokes. Much like the water that swaddled her into young-adulthood, Rankin’s songwriting is tidal and vibrating. And, despite the coastal enchantments of Alvvays, Antisocialites and Blue Rev, Rankin is afraid of the ocean—one of her greatest fears is being stranded on a boat by herself in the water. “There is something so mysterious about the ocean—there’s so much yet to be explored in that regard—and how powerful it is,” she adds. “It’s this force that fascinates me, and it’s terrifying.”
Alvvays began near the water in Charlottetown, the largest Prince Edward Island city. Molly, the daughter of John Morris Rankin (a fiddler in the Celtic folk ensemble the Rankin Family), was something of a songwriter herself, having credits on her family’s 2007 album Reunion and a bit of street-cred in the local spheres. She and her neighbor Kerri MacLellan would write music together, before later meeting Alec O’Hanley and making a solo EP called She with him three years later. There was a continuum from Rankin’s own work that would eventually become Alvvays, but not before the duo began playing songs like “Archie, Marry Me” and “Party Police” under Rankin’s name at different clubs around the Maritimes and the Northeastern United States. There was no intention then of making a record “as a band,” and the name we now all know didn’t come until a recording session with Chad VanGaalen later on. “It was Chad that pointed out midway through that this was a band, that this wasn’t a singer-songwriter situation any longer,” O’Hanley says. “And I think he was right.”
In a six-month span, Alvvays released “Adult Diversion” and “Archie, Marry Me” back-to-back, respectively. Rolling Stone compared the band to their heroes, Teenage Fanclub; friend of the site Josh Terry compared “Archie, Marry Me” to “the lovelorn innocence of the Beatles” in the Chicago Tribune; Pitchfork likened Rankin’s “Hey! Hey!” yelps to Rust Never Sleeps-era Neil Young. The indie world was (rightfully) becoming awed by Alvvays, but even Rankin was in disbelief about the track when she first sent the demo to O’Hanley while he was on tour with his high school band in Australia. “I was floored by it off the hop,” he says. “The note that she wrote with the MP3 was ‘Who wrote this?,’ because it sounded so familiar—of course ‘I’m ripping someone off’ was her initial instinct. But I racked my brain briefly and reassured her that she had written it. It sounded immediately classic and old, and that was entirely her doing.” Hearing that song for the first time clicked O’Hanley into focus. When he returned from Down Under, he and Rankin wrote the “Archie, Marry Me” bridge and solo and tried demoing it in Brooklyn, though that didn’t initially pan out and they returned to Canada to finish it.
Alvvays is a combination of material Rankin and O’Hanley had been playing between 2011 and 2013, with different formations of the band—largely whoever was available for little chunks of time and could get work off. “Other songs were thrown together in the studio with Chad very last minute, just to fill time,” Rankin admits. “But, there were always little ideas stewing in my head that I just didn’t really have the courage to pursue until we truly needed it to manifest or come to fruition. And that those became songs on that record—which blows my mind—I would never do that now.” “Atop a Cake” was the band’s attempt to rip off the Stone Roses. “It’s funny, the things you try and think are so obvious and deliberate and blatant that you never get called on,” O’Hanley says. “That was one of those instances where you expected finger-wagging Mancunians to descend in hordes, but they never did.” They made “Adult Diversion” and “Archie, Marry Me” tracks one and two, a good, punching introduction that was rare and appealed to O’Hanley’s self-prescribed “caveman brain.” After Canadian blogs like Cokemachineglow started covering Alvvays, he, Rankin and MacLellan thought they had a chance to pursue the band in earnest once and for all.
“We were confident with the record,” O’Hanley says. “It carried some attendant technical issues, as most of our records do, so we had to learn to EQ ourselves in order to resolve issues that resulted from dumping tape to computer a little too hot—that’s why the record sounds so dark, there was a lot of digital distortion in the top-end of the sonicsphere, so we rolled off all the frequencies above 10,000 hertz and it worked for that record. We had a serious treble aversion at the time, we were kind of scared of it for some reason, so we didn’t mind sounding a little idiosyncratic—as long as it was a deliberate decision. The songs carried us past those sonic limitations, and people could hear the gleaming nugget of a song shining through the murk. There’s no stinkers in our books.”
O’Hanley was learning how to mix back then, too, if only out of necessity, because “weird artifacts” were coming out as the mastering due date was encroaching on the band and tracks required him to “go in the box and fix a bunch of things and rebalance.” “Those responsibilities have just fallen on him, which I’m sad about, but he’s also really good at it,” Rankin says. As O’Hanley himself describes it, it was a “restorative” act—an elimination of weird overtones and balancing levels. “I was quite scared of screwing something up,” he confesses. “I had a very gentle touch with things, it was mainly subtractive EQ—I would only remove frequencies, I would never add them. I had read in this magazine called Tape Op that the human ear is way more sensitive to added frequencies. A human can tell when something’s been added that wasn’t there before. There’s a psychological thing at work, so I was avoiding that at all costs. Since then, we’re way more apt to crank the treble up on something if we want to hear it brighter and see how it makes us feel.”
When Alvvays was working with mixers on Antisocialites, they were pushed toward the limits of their own comfort by technicians who wanted to push the treble sliders all the way up. “It horrified us. It was like, ‘Oh, that’s not our zone. We don’t deal with treble. Please don’t do that,’” O’Hanley adds.” Their longtime love for Guided By Voices, Women and the Cleaners From Venus and those bands’ frequencies—where you don’t know if they’re recording in a studio, garage or basement—helped get them out of the woods of their own reservations. “We’ve loosened up over the last decade, I think it’s served us well,” O’Hanley concludes.
But even before their treble liberation in 2017, “Red Planet” was Alvvays’ experimental “departure song” on a straight-ahead indie pop album, while O’Hanley and Rankin recorded “Dives” in their attic in Charlottetown on a ballpark organ with a built-in drum machine they bought at a Value Village. “Party Police,” according to O’Hanley, feels like “another younger brain” produced it. “Sometimes I have trouble going there,” he says. “It’s just so, so sweet.” But he and the band have a soft spot for the sturdy, infectious riff of “Next of Kin.” “Archie, Marry Me” changed throughout the recording of Alvvays, because the band wanted to implement a wall of sound that took a lot of hours to capture. “It wasn’t necessarily something we had remotely honed while playing it live before the recording process, either,” Rankin says. “Just striking the balance of guitar and vocal, that’s been such an Everest for us.”
Alvvays wasn’t an overnight success story, either; their self-titled first LP was not out of the gates recognized like it is now. “By the accounts of the people that we worked with, they were mystified by the slow-burn nature of that album and how it just continued to grow,” Rankin says. “It’s been this incremental growth of everything. It’s given us a chance to keep up with it.” Alvvays was a project that took a while for the band to untangle. They spent two weeks with VanGaalen in Calgary but weren’t totally sure what the band was; they cycled through different drummers before landing on Phil MacIsaac. When they returned home to Toronto, Alvvays listened to all of the recordings and felt like they needed more work. “We didn’t really have any money,” Rankin continues, “so we were just getting friends to help us when they were available. We really knew nothing about how to produce anything or mix anything or record anything, and that’s some of the charm of this album, too—this naive space. And then, also, I look back and I think, ‘I never really want to do that again.’”
In 2013, Alvvays wanted to play a New Brunswick festival called Sappyfest (“We were like, ‘We will play a strawberry stand at this festival. We will do anything,’” Rankin says), but one of the stipulations for getting on the bill was that you had to have some type of released material. So, the band made Alvvays on cassette and started handing them out. Polyvinyl took notice of their SoundCloud and the online chatter around their “Adult Diversion” demo and wanted to put out the album, and the label has been a pillar for everything they’ve done since. “Our bar was so low, we just wanted to release the album so we could actually get shows—because we were having such a hard time getting anything in Canada,” Rankin says. “No one wanted to release the album in Canada, so our manager started a label and released it on that. We started just wanting to play at bars and then we went over to England and some of the shows were sold out. We didn’t really understand how that was even possible.”
The band was in England when Alvvays came out on July 22nd, 2014, and the big takeaway was that it had gone to #1 on the college radio charts in the States. “I didn’t really know what that meant—and I still don’t really know—but it sounded exciting,” Rankin says. The label broke the news to them after their London show. “Our press guy over here said, ‘Oh, you’re a real band now,’” O’Hanley says. “We had 10 minutes of happiness and then just resumed whatever pragmatic drudgery we were dealing with—getting our amps out of the club, or something.” O’Hanley remembers the energy when Alvvays came out, especially in England, rather fondly. “Real Estate was good enough to ask us to open over here, and we would just bomb around Bristol and Brighton and do karaoke with them after the shows,” he says. “We were ripping around in a little hatchback with the keyboard stands on our laps.” But he doesn’t want to fully rose-color that era. “Our first show in Brighton, we were staying in a hostel called Baggies Backpackers, and I bought a jar of peanut butter and it got ravaged by the fellow hostelers,” he laughs.
Rankin admits that those inaugural years of Alvvays were “really thrown together.” “Even shooting the video for ‘Archie, Marry Me,’ we were just biking with all of these cameras down to this ferry terminal to get to this sailboat, which one of our friend of a friend’s parents owned and were willing to take us out that day,” she says. “And, on the way there, one of our friends fainted, so we had to call an ambulance. Everything about it was just so close to not happening. I’m not really a spiritual person, but sometimes I wonder what other powers were involved in even having those songs released.”
2014 was a hotbed for muscular dream-pop acts to burgeon in, though O’Hanley remembers feeling like it was “a bit of a wasteland” at the time, relative to what musicians were hearing about the New York bands coming up 10 years prior—how the “indie sleaze” moment had enough institutional and cultural support to help acts break big in ways they couldn’t in 2024. “The little bit that you could scrape by on before, for a lot of bands, has been sliced in half,” O’Hanley says. “It’s a tricky pickle, but we’re deeply grateful that we came up at a time when there was some shred of support left. I don’t know if we’d still be a band in 2034 if we started in 2024.” Music criticism back then still had its head above water, beloved venues hadn’t yet been shuttered due to rent monopolizations and COVID-19, and scenes were still nurtured beyond the metropolitan meccas and regional go-to hubs. “I miss that energy where people could get by working a service industry job and still pursue what they wanted to do,” Rankin says. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t have any answers. You can feel the difference; change and loss is happening all the time in all these painful ways.”
Rankin brings up how South By Southwest (where Alvvays delivered course-altering performances in 2014) and its payment-by-exposure template was far more lucrative for a young act’s origins then than it is now. “The big thing was always like, ‘Who will be in the room when you play?’ We did so much of that, driving to Texas repeatedly and having to get back to work on Monday and driving straight back to Toronto with no sleep,” she says. “At the time, I felt like that was worthwhile to us. Now, I don’t know.” Rankin doesn’t miss much about those days, because they were so fraught. She was still waitressing then, trying to find scheduling gaps so Alvvays could go out on tour. O’Hanley worked late nights at a poutine restaurant (even though Rankin admits that she and MacLellan reaped the rewards of him having that gig). “It was all very stressful,” she says. “Now, I feel like I actually have so much more control. I understand how to say no to things that make me feel yucky. I don’t miss feeling a little bit powerless when it came to waking up super early to do a ‘really important’ radio session, feeling like those things actually had to happen when, in reality, now I feel comfortable sifting through things and doing what’s best for everyone, rather than feeling cornered.”
In fact, despite the surge of popularity Alvvays found between 2014 and 2017, Rankin couldn’t comfortably leave her day job until after they finished touring for Antisocialites in 2019. Quickly, it became impossible to keep a job with how busy the band was. “There were risks in letting go of the jobs, just throwing everything we had into it,” Rankin says. “I think the biggest risk was leaving the Maritimes and throwing everything into a cube van and driving it to Toronto, not knowing anyone. That, to us, was diving into the deep end of the pool and just hoping that we would come up for air at some point. It wasn’t without growing pains.”
Upon their arrival in Toronto, Mike Halichuk of Fucked Up became a formative, guiding presence for the band. “We played this concert series in Toronto called Long Winter,” Rankin says. “Mike was working that, booking bands and curating the program. He was there and we met, and I think it was one of the first times where we had a show where it felt like there was energy and like-minded people in the crowd who mildly understood what we were getting at. And I think Mike did, too.” Fucked Up took Alvvays on a Canadian tour just months after the self-titled LP came out, a string of dates that helped understand how to function on the road as a unit.
After touring relentlessly while Alvvays’s popularity climbed gradually, Rankin and the band felt overwhelmed by the time festival season concluded in 2016. “It was such a learning process for everyone, whether that’s touring or interviews or learning how to be thrown into situations with little resources and a lot of exposure and just trying to come out alive from it,” Rankin says. “I think we all just needed time alone.” There was no interpersonal tumult within the band, but that paralyzing exhaustion translated into Alvvays wanting to have more control over their vision and take their time with Antisocialites. “The energy that went into that album was us trying to delve back into a reflective space,” Rankin adds.
Antisocialites is the sound of, as O’Hanley puts it, the band escaping the murk of Alvvays and broadening their musical spectrum. LP 2 stretches out in many directions, stoking the flames of Alvvays’ variety band soul. “Bands like the Magnetic Fields or ABBA that can sound like eight different bands on one record—we’ve always looked up to acts like that,” O’Hanley says. The acerbic touchstones of the guitar-pop they upheld were still effervescent, but there was a mournful tinge to the C86 magic their songs conjured. They pulled out “Your Type,” which they’d been kicking around since before they had a name other than Rankin’s; she delivered an ode to Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain and the band peeled themselves bare on “Forget About Life,” in which Rankin sings about drinking lakes, undrinkable wine and growing reckless under the flickering light of nighttime signs; “Plimsoll Punks” is the manifestation of Television performing Dick Dale; “Hey” sounds like a Go-Go’s outtake, the first of multiple nods to Belinda Carlisle the band has made over the years. “Every record, I just feel like we know more and we have more available tools in our brain to tackle some of these approaches,” Rankin says. “That’s also just us as a band. It’s different styles of songs, they’re so all over the map that it’s just one big puzzle all the time.
Whether or not they realized it, Alvvays became more confident and more empowered on Antisocialites. Rankin calls the record “a huge journey going into the hands of different people and trying to steer it into the place that made us feel good about it.” They were learning how to use the Tascam 388 eight-track, quarter-inch tape machine they used with VanGaalen three years earlier. John Congleton was supposed to mix Antisocialites but nabbed just a producer credit instead, so the band mixed much of the record themselves. “We had to learn what compression was this time around and how to get our record to sound like records we liked,” O’Hanley says. “We were listening to [Cocteau Twins’] Blue Bell Knoll quite a bit around that era but had no idea how to get there.” The engineers and recordists Alvvays worked with didn’t want them to play other bands’ records while making their own, but they rebelled against that. “We never really understood it,” O’Hanley continues. “If a record is great, then it’s probably tapped into some magic combination in the frequency spectrum that is worth studying. We don’t mind getting studious or clinical about these things.” It’s a musical academia that led to Alvvays getting shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2018.
It wasn’t until the band linked up with Sean Everett for Blue Rev during COVID-19 that they found their “kindred dude who loved to be referential to the nth degree” and were able to do deep dives on making songs sound exactly like the Smiths, Psychedelic Furs and Neil Young. “Invariably, you end up in a weird spot where you still sound like yourself and it doesn’t necessarily sound like an impersonation,” O’Hanley adds. “You ideally end in this zone where you land in an indeterminate era, where it sounds like neither the past nor present—certainly not contemporary.”
10 years and three albums later, and no phrase better describes Alvvays than “neither the past nor present.” In the world of their music, monochrome is a figment of our imagination. Their songs exist in full technicolor. They strum their guitars while flicking the whammy bar up and down, somehow shredding while moving in slow-motion. Alvvays, too, are a bashful emoticon personified into the best rock band in North America. Rankin has not yet made a comfortable home in the high review scores, glowing press and sold-out tours. When talking about their touring regimens, she calls herself and her bandmates “gremlins.” “Gremlins who play good tunes,” I say. “We’re trying,” she replies coyly. Rankin is anything but opaque. “Some of the earlier songs, they feel a little far away from me,” she admits. “Some nights, I feel like I can connect with them, but it was also just a different lifetime—I have to work a little bit harder to embody that narrative. Singing ‘You’re keeping a dead girl in the closet,’ I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’”
The songs from Blue Rev, however, feel more immediate and recent for Rankin, who contends that they all jump into the characters she imagined when she was writing them. It’s the kind of record that, a decade ago, anyone who’s ever watched a sunset burst into a confection of amber-warm tufts and candy-stripe the sky could have telegraphed Alvvays making all the way back then. From the first guitar swirls of “Pharmacist” to the blithe, heady solo from O’Hanley on “Pomeranian Spinster” to the resplendent goodness of the “Belinda Says” dreamscape mirroring the titular blue malt drink being peddled near a skating rink, Blue Rev sounds like the kind of euphoria we all selfishly want to bottle up for ourselves and never let go of. It’s a deluge of pop fantasticals enrolled in shoegaze and garage-punk graduate courses; a kiss of fortune while standing on the rubble of a twisted, shaking fallout. But listening to Blue Rev over and over and holding it in the part of your chest that was once-vacant, is a very romantic way of dreaming of always being madly in love. Even when Rankin sings “I’ll always be looking for ways to remember the sound of the lottery noises that I can’t believe rang for me,” the worst messes of life are lit from within by a noble pursuit of what winsome ephemera survives through the melancholy.
Right now, Alvvays are at the tail-end of the same thing they’ve been doing for their entire career: gigging around the world for two or three years after making a perfect album. They’re trying to get back to Cape Breton sometime between shows in South Korea and Montreal and, once the summer is over, they’re going to take time to “live life and reclaim our friendship and our space.” “We all really like playing the songs still, and we do try our best to make every trip really enjoyable—especially just becoming a slightly bigger operation,” Rankin says. “We have more support, couple more crew members, and they’ve actually been such a huge part of whether or not the trips have been a blast. And when you find people that you love that want to come along, it’s incredible. Even though it’s been rigorous, it’s been really fulfilling, I think, for all of us—and we’re pretty good at it, good at being miserable not having showered in a few days.”
As the Blue Rev Tour has grown and grown, the consensus is obvious: Alvvays have never sounded better, both on the stage and on the record. Prepping for this chapter of shows required the band holing up for weeks in their rehearsal space, mapping setlists out on MacLellan’s keyboards and deciding “how best to skin those cats.” “I think there are so many synth sounds between the three albums that Kerri is our secret weapon,” Rankin says. “It looks like she’s just reading a book when she’s onstage; no one really understands everything that she’s doing at all times. It’s usually at least three things at once, sometimes four.” All of it was grueling, especially because the band was picking themselves up off the ground and learning “how to play music again” at the same time.
Rankin, O’Hanley, MacLellan and Sheridan Riley are hard on themselves, but not on others. “When we get off stage, we talk about everything we did wrong for about 10 minutes and comfort each other,” Rankin adds. “It’s something we each share, I think it makes us try to precisely execute the songs. But sometimes, it’s a disaster. We have disasters sometimes. If I screw up a guitar part or I knew that I was dragging on a dropout, I will need to get that off my chest and apologize to everyone after the set—and everyone else is like that, too. You just have to get it out and say it so it’s not this weird thing and so it doesn’t happen again. Then we can just have a good time, but it’s never an accusatory or tense thing. It’s us laughing about it.”
One of the greatest Bonnie & Clyde duos of the millennium, you can trace Rankin and O’Hanley’s meshing of interests all the way from that National Geographic cover 10 years ago to the platter of Murder, She Wrote references, narrative asides and Lush stamps on Blue Rev in 2022. And as the years have passed, Rankin and O’Hanley have become progressively more forceful with their convictions when writing together. “It invariably leads to the odd scrap, which is fine,” O’Hanley says. “It’s, in fact, good and shows that both parties care deeply about the art. It’s been a balance of respecting each other’s opinions and knowing when to stick to your guns and when to concede. But if Molly and I didn’t have that intersection of our tastes to rely on, then we wouldn’t be half the band we are.” When O’Hanley is trying to go for ABBA-like accents in a chorus, he and Rankin have to reckon with “little implications of various tonalities” due to their respective musical infrastructures.
“She has impeccable taste and I, sometimes, have a conflicting idea of where to direct a song. I think about things a little more functionally sometimes than she does, whether it’s the role a 12-string acoustic might play in a song for her that might trigger a traditional implication—because she comes from a folk background a little bit, so I have to navigate that,” O’Hanley adds. “I think our editing process is so intense, between Alec and I,” Rankin continues. “We have to have an overlap of taste and compromise and both feel really good about something before it gets made. And once it gets made, the same process has to happen. We’ve left a lot of things on the cutting room floor as a result of that, and I’m grateful to have an editor I really believe in in the process.”
Rankin sings the final verse of “Adult Diversion” over and over until the pendulum of backing harmonies swings into inaudible gasps of color beneath a coda of swirling synthesizers and roundabout guitar chords circling each other like sharks: “If I should fall, act as though it never happened.” Sometimes, if you say something over and over long enough, it becomes true. But for Alvvays, they’ve never been a band that put all of their weight behind absolutes. We’ve had them for a decade, and all that they’ve given us has been three albums. No one-off singles or studio-recorded cover songs. It’s all killer, no filler. If you want to know what they’re getting up to between albums, go see them play a show. In a world where artists are flooding the markets with discographies overwrought with fodder, Alvvays make themselves available only when it’s necessary—and they’re comfortable with that. “You have to be fine with being left out of the conversation or forgotten,” Rankin says. “And, to me, that’s okay.”
But even though it took the band five years to release Blue Rev—thanks to a pandemic, demos getting stolen and a flood ruining some of their equipment—it’s the best album of the 2020s so far, and one of the greatest albums of all time already. And even if that wasn’t the case, we would all still be lucky to be alive at the same time as Alvvays, a band that’s never once been left out of the conversation, no matter how prepared they are for being left behind or how long they take to release music. To share a lifetime with them is as bittersweet as it is treasured, as they build songs out of the detritus of yesteryear and make them sound like blockbusters. And while Rankin finds herself worrying about “overstaying my welcome” during album cycles (“Who would possibly want to hear another 35 minutes of my vocal?” she asks), she and her bandmates changed indie rock forever when those birds started chirping at the dawn of “Archie, Marry Me” 10 years ago and an inventory of broken promises, domestic desire and drowning boyfriends followed just a few beats behind.
And though “Archie, Marry Me”—which Rankin originally wrote during a six-foot snowstorm in a Halifax farmhouse with the intention of poking fun at marriage (rhyming “matrimony” with “alimony” certainly does the trick)—has become linked to proposals and a nostalgia for 2014, it’s the most obvious entry-point into Alvvays even to this day. “Most artists go in knowing that, once you put something out into the world, it takes on its own life and meaning,” Rankin says. “It isn’t really your song anymore.” The song is, for the rest of us, what “Sparky’s Dream” was to Rankin when Alvvays was just starting out. “That song just blew my mind,” she says. “It embodied everything that I wanted to pursue in music. It’s what you’re always chasing for—that wonder and that sparkle.”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
