If you like your indie-pop cut with a dose of 21st century reality, Toronto’s Alvvays has just the LP for you. On their self-titled debut album, the band sounds like a female-led but with less of an accent and a stronger sense of millennial dread. “You took something before you went in the shower,” lead singer Molly Rankin sings on the shimmering “to help suppress the things that make you feel uptight.”
Despite their shimmering sound, built around snappy rhythms and sun-bleached guitar riffs, Alvvays is always a scar away from true twee-dom. The characters in these songs trade the love they have for the love they don’t (“Ones Who Love You”) and are “suffering from a case of sobriety,” (“The Agency Group”) a line that reads punk but ultimately settles as a sort of them’s-the-breaks lament.
There’s nothing ideal about the world of Alvvays, full of bad decisions, unhealthy obsessions and self-medication. But the music captures how modern young adults suffer and convalesce without coming off as self-absorbed shlock. And despite the debauchery, their needs are simple and quaint: a shoulder to lean on, a name to write beside your’s on the belly of an underpass. But for Alvvays as for us, finding that happiness is a gritty struggle, but ultimately a worthy one. You won’t hear these songs in any Wes Anderson flicks, but almost all of “Alvvays” makes up an ideal soundtrack for the highs and—realistically—lows of your summer.
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Dylan Owens is Reverb’s all-purpose news blogger and album reviewer. You can read more from him in Relix magazine and the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
