It may be clouded in haze and rippled with waves of distortion, but there’s a steely perfectionism to Alvvays’ music. The Canadian quintet’s driving indie-rock tracks are constructed around euphoric key changes, surprising codas and heartbreaking grace notes; although lead singer and guitarist Molly Rankin says the five-year gap between 2017’s Antisocialites and this year’s Blue Rev “wasn’t supposed to be this long”, you can’t help but listen to the album and hear an impulse to make every guitar solo fizz, to imbue each song with a jolting sense of surprise. And, of course, when Rankin is asked whether she’s a perfectionist, she provides the quintessential perfectionist’s answer: “I mean, I wouldn’t use the word perfect.”
In truth, Rankin and her bandmates – guitarist Alec O’Hanley and keys player Kerri MacLellan, who both wrote the album with Rankin, along with bassist Abbey Blackwell and drummer Sheridan Riley – make music with a brutally exacting eye. They aren’t personalities, and they clearly aren’t driven by any desire for festival main-stage success. Instead, they’re trying, perhaps monomaniacally, to capture the jouissance, if not the exact sound, of classic 80s and 90s indie bands such as Dolly Mixture, the Smiths and Teenage Fanclub. “There is a world that we insist on inhabiting, and to get into that world it takes a lot of time,” says Rankin, Zooming from the Toronto apartment that all five band members are currently living in ahead of a world tour. “It takes a lot of work to make things sound rough, and pretty, and strange and familiar.”
