On a scale of one to 10, how crazy was 2023 for the rock band Alvvays?
“I would say an eight, probably,” frontwoman Molly Rankin deadpans to GRAMMY.com. If that's true, she doesn't show it. “I'm pretty sedate as a person,” she explains during an on-camera portion of the interview, “So, if you want anything with more energy, I can certainly try.”
This belies that Alvvays poured a lot of energy into Blue Rev, their imagination and melody packed third album, which put them on the map for many back in 2022.
Blue Rev's third single, “Belinda Says,” was an instant favorite among the indie set — and now, it's netted a nomination for Best Alternative Music Performance at the 2024 GRAMMYs.). (They're up against Arctic Monkeys (“Body Paint”), boygenius (“Cool About It”, Lana Del Rey (“A&W”), and Paramore (“This Is Why.”)
Sure, Rankin might have a stoic air. But she's clearly also thoughtful, intent on cannily navigating these unfamiliar waters, shoulder-to-shoulder with her bandmates: keyboardist Kerri MacLellan, guitarist Alec O'Hanley, bassist Abbey Blackwell, and drummer Sheridan Riley.
“Just being included or mentioned has been exciting, because when we started, we couldn't even get a show. I just want to have that same mentality,” Rankin says. “I just don't ever want to feel entitled to an award or a review or a piece.”
Whatever happens at the 2024 GRAMMYs, Rankin's holistic attitude will ease the way forward — and we'll always have Blue Rev as an exemplar of lush, witty indie rock, with more hooks than a tackle box.
Read on for an interview with Rankin about Alvvays' [pronounced always] whirlwind 2023, and their road to Music's Biggest Night — along with a bonus, exclusive clip of her in conversation with GRAMMY.com.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
You've said you “didn't want to get swept up” in the GRAMMYs thing. What do you mean by that?
Well, the truth is that you apply for GRAMMYs. So, for anyone to say that they're not intrigued by that, after applying or having someone apply on your behalf, it's a little bit strange.
What do the GRAMMYs mean? We've always watched them as kids. I don't know, in recent years if I've been so up to date, but [there have been] a lot of big performances.
When we were recording Blue Rev, we were sitting on [engineer/producer] Shawn Everett's couch and he had probably four or something GRAMMYs just sitting on his console. It is a large presence.
Where do you personally place the GRAMMYs in your musical universe?
I think that it's cool to see lesser known artists crack into that world, whatever that ends up meaning. But awards as a concept have had such a low bar for expectation, and I've always just thought that every development with us has been this really rare bonus. Expecting anything, for me, has not been the right approach.
What do you remember about guiding the band out of the bar circuit — aiming your arrow a little higher?
We generally tried to play in the United States as much as we could, because staying in Canada and becoming a Canadian band can be limiting. I don't really know why, but it can be.
We always just wanted to crack into other regions and see if we could sustain ourselves. But I have so many friends who are so much more talented than I am that haven't gotten to do things like that with their music. So, again, it's all just exciting to us.
What do you remember about the biz 10 years ago as opposed to now?
It did seem like there were more venues. Maybe it was easier, in a way, to blow up.
Like, if you were mentioned on a blog, that would just be kind of like a platform for you to just take off and tour and be everywhere. But it's not so much that anymore. I think just with the cost of everything, and people [not being] so reliant on reviews, they can pick and choose what they like.
Things have changed. I don't know where things are going to go. We're all just hanging onto the bumper.
As streaming continued its grip on everything and touring became even more of an insane, expensive ordeal, what do you remember about keeping the band ballasted?
We didn't have an overnight success type thing. Our album was out for probably a year before we really felt like we were touring in a really big way. And everything felt so gradual that we did have time to have those growing pains, but we also had jobs.
So, I don't know. Everything has been so incremental for us, even though maybe it doesn't seem like that to some people. But Alec's been in so many other bands and paid a lot of his dues — worked at various poutine restaurants. I'm trying to think of how to extrapolate on that.
What were you aiming to do with Blue Rev, as per your creative and professional trajectories?
Well, first, the goal was to write more songs, and that seems like a mountain to climb sometimes.
And then, to actually complete an album, for Alec and I to have the same opinion on where a song has ended up versus what the demo sounded like. And just coming to a place where we both feel the same way. That is such a process for us, and a labor of love.
But finishing the record was all that I was really pinning my hopes and dreams on, and everything else has so much more to do with the timing and who is believing you and listening to you and understanding what you're saying. And people put out things all the time that don't land, and a lot of it is not really in their hands.
I guess with this album, I did want everything to be a little bit more reflective of our live show, too, because I think that we can be a pretty aggressive band, guitar-wise, and can be an energetic band. But I'm not sure that was necessarily reflected in our previous recordings.
What do you remember about bringing Blue Rev to the finish line?
I think that there were so many different nights where me, Kerri, Alec, and Sean just never slept. And that can bring out the best in you and the worst in you.
But we did have a lot of fun doing it. And we did it in person, we did it on computers, like this [remote video interview], and Sean was there with us the whole way to help us through it.
Just going back at the end of mastering and listening to all the demos that I had lived with for years, and felt so unhealthily attached to, and realizing that every finished song was vastly better than those artifacts — that was really gratifying.
I recently interviewed Adrian from the Black Pumas about working with Shawn Everett; he remembers Shawn cranking up a minor detail until it became the soul of the song. Were there any particular instances like that?
He [Shawn] has such a great sense of moments of impact, and he just understands when something needs to feel moving and when something needs to shift.
I really think that we connected on that in a big way. And he has such a grasp of expansive sound. But yeah, he also hears things. He hears hooks, and is a musician in his own regard. So there were so many things that I feel like we've learned from him.
There's a bridge in this song called “Very Online Guy,” where he created this whole other experimental portion melodically in the chunk of the bridge because he will just take a random thing you say and copy and paste it into a song just as an experiment.
So that was basically what he did, and it ended up working with some editing. But he is a very unpredictable person and not afraid to be rejected, which is so important.
How are you preparing for the GRAMMYs? And what are you looking forward to in 2024 and beyond?
I think just us showing up and going there is really surreal for us. So we're excited to just put on an outfit and sit in a seat for six hours and watch the crazy production that is the GRAMMYs.
But I want to just keep making music that I like and that I feel good about putting out into the world. And hopefully that'll continue to be in the form of albums and pop songs that I like to write and mess around with.
I'm so lucky to have also the people that are in the band with us. And Alec has always been such a fruitful collaborator, and that collaboration is something that I really feel passionately about — and editing each other and bouncing ideas off of one another It's this really intangible element that I really appreciate, and just to continue to do that would be ideal.
Are you planning to go for the full monty on the red carpet? Are you guys going to serve looks or stay out of that racket?
I don't know if we're capable of being polished to that degree, but we'll see what's in store for us. I know that we have a lot of people that care about us. They might come through for us and get us some new pants. God knows we need them.