Always, Alvvays
Images by Norman Wong, Luke Funicella, Eleanor Petry, and the band.
Here at Monster Children, we like music. Turns out, Nora also likes music.
One of her favorite makers of music happens to be one of our favorites as well, and we of course refer to the indie/pop, three-fifths-Canadian dream group, Alvvays.
Through soaring, anthemic choruses and rousing-yet-mushy guitars, Alvvays has always had a knack for creating music that jogs. Their first album, self-titled, released in 2014, was an immediate hit among indie heads and people who meddled around with distorted amp cones, expressing narratives in ways that separated the group - consisting in its current iteration as Molly Rankin, Kerri MacLellan, Sheridan Riley, Alec O’Hanley, and Abbey Blackwell - from the crowded field of landfill indie that had permeated the guitar scene in the years immediately prior. Alvvays (we mean the album, but the band as well) is endearing, sincere, and at times, painfully vulnerable. Their 2017 album, Antisocialites, followed the sonic path that Alvvays had laid before it, exploring narrative arcs and multi-melodic compositions that even further defined the group’s unique sound.
Their latest and long-awaited album, Blue Rev, was released early in 2022 and took a more harmonic, clean, composed approach. Though there is plenty of lovely guitar mush, there is a newfound determination and clarity in these tracks that lean more toward the ‘pop’ in indie/pop. As Alvvays is one of Nora’s favorites, we spoke with Molly Rankin, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter-ist of Alvvays one morning to hear all about it.
Thanks for taking the time to chat!
Yeah, my pleasure. I’m not sure how this all manifested so quickly but thanks for having me.
Well we have a guest editor for this issue, Nora Vasconcellos, who is a big fan of Alvvays, so she sort of manifested it.
Oh, very cool. Is she in a band?
Not to my knowledge, but she probably could be. She’s a professional skateboarder. Are you in on skating at all?
Actually, no, not really, but anyone who can do anything on a skateboard, I applaud.
If it isn’t clear yet, you’re in Alvvays, which is one of our favorite bands. How’s that going?
Pretty good, we are gearing up to become busier than we have been in the last couple of months. We had a nice couple of months of break where we all returned to our respective cities, relaxed, but now are getting ready to get back to it.
Your respective cities? Are you not all in the same place?
We started out all together on the east coast of Canada, but we’ve changed and moved just based on people’s life arc. Our drummer, Sheridan [Riley], who has been with us for about five years and is based out of Seattle, introduced us to our bass player, Abbey [Blackwell], who is also in Seattle. So now we are two fifths Seattle and three fifths Toronto.
What’s this uniting factor you have coming up?
We have a big tour of the UK and Europe. Doing Primavera and all that. A lot of different countries to enter, a lot of paper work.
I’m always interested in how people cope with tour because it can be a nightmarish experience. How do you stay sane while on extensive tours?
Hmm… I think that knowing when to not speak is a great skill to have.
That’s a very interesting answer, what does that mean?
I just think that we are all a bunch of clucking chickens and it’s really fun and exciting and my instinct is just to fill up any space with as much talking as I can, but letting silence exist comfortably is a really important thing. We’re all pretty skilled at that now. It’s very nice.
Do you mean like, to not annoy each other?
It’s not even that, I don’t think anyone is annoyed by us or by each other. I think it’s more about just enjoying the beauty in silence. I don’t know if that’s a good answer. There are other, more important things, like treating your body right and stuff. I treat every tour like a marathon, and the main thing for me is preserving my voice because there’s so much singing in the set now and at such a range, so that’s where not talking comes in handy.
“ I think we’ve always been in our own little lane, for better or for worse. Usually the test about whether something is good is if it can be remembered. ”
Great answer. Most people say things like, ‘bring a passport carrier,’ or, ‘eat a lot of fruit,’ I appreciate that your answer is just to speak less.
Oh yeah, those are probably good ideas, too. I agree with those.
We listen to your music a lot at the office and find it to be very listenable regardless of what we are working on or who is in, and I’m curious about who your music is intended for or if there is an audience in mind?
Well, I might ask you to define ‘listenable’ for me first.
Everyone we know likes your songs, you’ve found a niche that is very approachable and applicable and fun to hear regardless of the person or scenario.
That’s very nice of you to say because I don’t know if the recordings are the most hi-fi, I know that people sometimes bristle at the mid-fi-ness of some of our records. I think it takes a long time for me to collect enough ideas. I mean ideas conceptually, but also just sonically finding hooks and choruses and little melodies that weave through the songs. That takes such a long time for me to do, and takes even longer to make sure they aren’t someone else’s hooks. I’m probably harder on myself than anyone else is in that way and I throw a lot of things out. I try to make sure that every song has its own arc, and its own excitement. I guess, in doing that, it means that a lot gets thrown out and a lot of time goes by, but if it passes those barriers - and gets by Alec, who is another barrier - then it gets out in the wild and is hopefully a success. I never really think about who listens to our music. One thing that I love is really loud guitars, and a big part of our sound has been the conflict between Alec’s guitar and my vocals, and I have enjoyed this really unique challenge which is striking the balance between them.
With all of those songwriting filtration systems in place, how do you think you and your process for writing have evolved over the years?
The boring answer is the truth, which is that it is a blend of different strategies. You get a lightning bolt moment where you are just overcome by an idea and write it down however you can, as quickly as you can, and the other way is just by sitting at a keyboard for hours on end, just failing. So much of it is just about failing, for hours, until something works, which is pretty sad most of the time. The sound of failure is also really unique. I guess the process hasn’t changed that much over the years. I’m still pretty vicious with my own ideas and Alec is, too. I also think that a lot of our songs are about things that have been pretty well covered, like relationship arcs, and for us it’s a matter of figuring out ways to tell those stories in ways that they haven’t been told before, even if it’s just through using language that you wouldn’t normally hear in a pop-ish song.
Do you feel pressure to separate yourself and your music because you often cover such trodden territory?
I don't think so. I think we’ve always been in our own little lane, for better or for worse. Usually the test about whether something is good is if it can be remembered.
Yeah, that’s a good bar to have: can we all remember the words?
Yeah, exactly what I said.
What do you do outside of music and do those things affect your music?
I’m definitely not a workaholic, but when I do work, it is in very focused chunks. Having things outside of work definitely enriches the pursuit of making good music. I love to run around the city or go for long walks when the weather is good. I got into gardening during the pandemic. I also got really into fantasy sports and have been a basketball fan for a long time, so I don’t mind shooting hoops, sometimes. What else…
I don’t hear a lot of jogging songs from you guys.
Yeah, good point. We did have a line about basketball but it didn’t make it onto the record.
Do you think you use these hobbies to separate yourself from music or do they intersect?
There are certain things that I need to do to feel like a full human. There’s only so much creative energy that I have personally, sometimes it can be diminishing returns. A new hobby for me is not having a day job, which has been good, but you have to fill your life up with other things to prevent music from feeling like a job. I force myself to be outside for at least an hour a day.
What’d you do before?
I worked as a server and a busser for probably a decade while in Alvvays, just because they would let me go on tour when I needed to. Everyone I worked with was also working that job so that they could pursue other creative endeavors, and sometimes you can end up getting sucked into those jobs. I’m lucky that we released our first album and it resonated with people and I kind of became a liability at my job so I got to leave, but it was starting to consume me a little.
You were a liability?
Yeah, who wants to schedule someone who can only work two days a week, every couple of months between tours.
I have a lot of friends who go on tour fairly frequently and they keep having to get a job for two months, then quit to leave again, so they’ve had dozens of jobs. I think that now, it’s fair to call you famous, what are your aspirations moving forward?
I would disagree with your famous claim. The goal for me is to be able to be creative while we tour and to keep a really healthy band unit, making sure everyone feels like they’re part of something worthwhile, because it is a very intense thing to be doing. As we get a bit older, people start wondering, ‘what’s the best use of my time, here?’ Same with the crew that we work with, we are all very close friends, and it’s important to us now to make sure everyone feels good about what we are doing and spending our time on. One day at a time. I don’t know. Looking into the future has never really benefited me.
Get your hands on Issue 72, here.