Alvvays

Blue Rev (2022)

Alvvays made their most sonically ambitious record by adding more noise — the guitars louder and more distorted than on their first two albums, but the melodic architecture underneath is stronger too, as if the band calculated exactly how much abrasion the hooks could absorb. 'Belinda Says' opens with a guitar figure and vocal melody that each complete and complicate the other; 'After the Earthquake' is the closest the band has come to pure noise-pop, its central riff buried under enough feedback to qualify as wall-of-sound. Molly Rankin's voice remains the record's constant — clear and almost conversational above the distortion, a technical feat that few vocalists in guitar music have matched.

Sleeve notes

Blue Rev · 2022

Alvvays emerged from Prince Edward Island in 2014 with a sound that was at once obviously assembled from existing components — Smiths jangle, shoegaze reverb, nineties indie-pop melody — and completely their own. The debut's "Archie, Marry Me" became the indie anthem of the moment partly for its conceit (a marriage proposal rejected on economic grounds) and partly because Molly Rankin's vocal performance rendered the sarcasm and the vulnerability simultaneously. The songs were hooks inside reverb, or vice versa.

Antisocialites (2017) refined the approach and confirmed the band's ability to write. Blue Rev (2022) was the statement: nine songs of near-impeccable indie-pop, louder and more urgent than anything they'd done, with a production clarity that let every hook land. Alvvays are the contemporary band most persuasively making the case that the pleasures of the jangly, reverb-heavy guitar song are not exhausted. They've made something that sounds familiar and fresh without strain.