A dark bruise of storm clouds begins to clot in the background of a family photo on the coast of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. The scene resembles a Renaissance painting: Mom, serving early-90s chic in her chambray button-up and khaki baseball cap, throws her glance sideways to dad who pulls their 5-year-old daughter from choppy waters to the safety of dry land. The wild-eyed child looks back at the camera over a bulky orange life jacket and a mane of blonde hair, her gaze startled and urgent.
That kid was Molly Rankin, founding singer-songwriter of the Canadian indie-pop band Alvvays — and that arresting image is the artwork of Blue Rev, the quintet’s Grammy-nominated third LP. She came across the shot a few years ago while flipping through an envelope of photographs taken by her aunt. Rankin hadn’t yet written a single note for what would become the celebrated follow-up to 2017’s Antisocialites, but she knew it had to be the cover of the next record.
“Finding something that makes you feel that way is so rare,” Rankin, 37, says. “Using that photo of the past just made sense to me. This album was one of the first times I actually wove in some of my own experience of what it was like being a teen in Nova Scotia. There was a thematic link there, but the contrast in the sky was also really interesting to me: the symbolism of having this warm blanket of family support pulling you off a boat and onto a wharf with this horrible storm coming in behind you.”
This personal touch carries over to the album title, referencing the brand name of syrupy electric-blue wine cooler Rankin and her teenage friends would sneak “at rink dances and in graveyards.” And it doesn’t take long for bits of her biography to bubble to the surface of the music, like her short-lived experiment with higher ed at Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University: “I dropped out / college education’s a dull knife,” she sings with equal parts power and sweetness. “If you don’t believe in the lettered life / then maybe this is our only try.”
But it’s not all backward glances on Blue Rev. The band scales new heights as the album skates across its 39-minute runtime, finding deeper pockets of melody amid blistering walls of shoegaze guitar and delicate turns of twee tenderness. Much like the group’s knack for synthesizing their influences into a singular force, these 14 songs find Alvvays pulling off the delicate high-wire act of taking listeners to new territory that still somehow feels familiar.
Boulder Weekly called Rankin ahead of the band’s upcoming Aug. 24 performance with New Zealand power-pop outfit The Beths at Denver’s Mission Ballroom to talk about her band’s 10th anniversary, their masterful third LP and penchant for taking big creative swings.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
It’s been 10 years this month since the first Alvvays record. Are those big anniversaries meaningful to you, or is that just the sort of thing music journalists like because it gives them something to write about?
[Laughs.] Yes, and no. The years have really flown by, so it doesn’t feel like a ton of time for me. But at the same time, so much has happened. When I think about working with Chad Van Galen [on our self-titled debut] and how much of a strange dream it was when he agreed to do it with us, it’s really overwhelming. To think about the time we spent together and the work he put into it gets me excited and makes me feel a bit more invested in some type of milestone like that. But otherwise, I’m not really all that sentimental about milestones.
Happy birthday, by the way. Milestones all around.
How do you know that?
You’re Alvvays. We have to know!
Nardwuar!
How did you celebrate your 37th?
We were on a flight. The birthday was essentially erased because we left on the 26th in Toronto, and we landed the night of the 27th in Korea because it’s basically a day ahead. So it was almost like it never happened.
When you look back on who you were at 27, and where the band was in 2014, what has changed and what has stayed the same?
Something that hasn’t changed is I never expect any type of warm reception with what we put out there. I’ve never hung any expectation on what this could be. As a result, everything has been essentially icing to us. It’s not to say we don’t work really hard at what we do, but I feel like so much of music is about timing. There’s a lot that’s out of your control.
Something that has changed is that all of us are good at getting what we need out and feeling more comfortable asking for things that are necessary. I was always afraid of burdening people, when really it was very baseline things I needed. I would feel timid or not competent enough to get what I want out of a situation, and it’s taken a lot of time to come out of that place and just communicate properly. That skill is so important when you’re traveling with a bunch of people and you’re just trying to maintain happiness or stability in a working environment. Learning how to speak to people directly but politely is a hard-to-harvest skill.
Can you give an example?
Saying “no.” I’m very comfortable doing that now. I have a pretty good grasp of — I hate this word — boundaries, and what makes me feel gross and what I’m OK with. That could be answering a specific type of question or being asked to play a show that we don’t really feel good about. If we’re opening for some huge act and we only have 20 minutes to figure out how to get sound and have everything on stage before playing for thousands of people, I feel like we’re all a lot better at getting precisely what’s needed in order to get through the set. That stuff has happened so much over the last 10 years of touring that we’re actually really good at operating in a circus now.
Let’s talk about Blue Rev. It’s one of those albums I have to force myself to stop putting on repeat, or I’ll just make myself sick with it.
We all have those!
What’s a record like that for you?
I was just listening to the David Kilgour album,Here Come the Cars. I was in a huge obsession cycle and now I’m revisiting it again. I kind of overplayed it for myself by just repeating it constantly.
I do that a lot when I’m trying to write and become inspired by other things.
It’s interesting to hear you say that, because your music is so singular but it also feels very connected to your influences. How do you navigate those two pieces?
Being able to successfully channel any influence — and that could just mean a drum sound — is hard to pull off. Any time I feel like we’ve successfully done that, it always just ends up sounding like our band. I don’t know if that’s because of my vocal or our guitar. But I also just really like to do impressions of people. So sometimes I like to inhabit the space of my favorite vocalist and see what the song would sound like if I tried to take on some of their idiosyncrasies.
There’s a guitar lick on Blue Rev that feels like a direct reference to “This Charming Man” by The Smiths.
Oh, interesting! You’re probably thinking about “Pressed.” We were trying to do a Smiths verse and an R.E.M. chorus.
But like you say, it’s unmistakably Alvvays. A lot of that seems to do with these unexpected turns, where the song takes a big swing you don’t really see coming. How consciously are you seeking out those moments?
I’m a disciple of the radio, so sometimes I have these really weird pop instincts that find their way into the songs and I dial that back a bit [laughs]. It’s a mashup of that and more niche things like ’80s guitar groups like The Feelies and The dBs. I also like playing with structure and creating different twists and turns, because I don’t want to keep writing the same song every time. So you experiment, chopping things up and playing with it. That means you have to go down a lot of different roads, and that takes a lot of time — which is something we tend to do with records.
You can hear that in the music. Your albums sound very fussed over.
We believe we’re too fussy for our own good. But then I listen to previous iterations of what we’re working on, and I’m very glad that at the end of the day that we had those arguments and thought things through to the point that we’re happy with it.
A lot of listeners and critics seem to agree that Blue Rev is the high mark of your career so far. Did it feel like you were on to something special when you were making it?
We generally treat every album like it’s our last try at making a record. You never actually know [how it’s going to be received]. Everyone goes through that, where they make something to the best of their ability and then people can just be like, “meh.” I don’t want to pretend like I have a better scale of what our best thing is or what will resonate with people. They might just not like the way we dress anymore, and the album therefore sucks. [Laughs.] We just wanted to make sure it felt the way it needed to feel and hoped that other people would understand.
ON THE BILL: Alvvays with The Beths. 8 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 24, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop St., Denver. $43