Why has no one thought to better organize the institution of power pop? Ever since Big Star chimed in with their #1 Record, bands of all stripes—the pop group with a shreddy guitarist, the pivoting mid-career punks, the shoegaze band going sober—have gathered loosely under this jubilant banner to pay tribute to broken hearts through hooks and harmonies. At some point, an intrepid fan could have borrowed from the various committees that oversee ska and emo and split power pop into waves, or at the very least adopted a post- or a nü- prefix along the way to divide a genre that’s collected bands since the Nixon era, from the Raspberries to the Go-Gos to Superchunk to the New Pornographers.
So let’s hang a sign over Alvvays and their astonishingly great album Blue Rev as the sound of the genre today. Call it dream-power pop, power pop-gaze, nü-power pop, it doesn’t matter—it’s just one Toronto band absorbing its spirit, mastering its construction, and making it all their own. While singer-songwriter Molly Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley had started writing Blue Rev back in 2017, a series of unfortunate events—floods, thefts, visa issues, a global pandemic—delayed the recording of the album until last year, when the band finally entered the studio with veteran producer Shawn Everett. Armed with a new rhythm section and the one producer you hire when you want to “level up” in the indie world, Alvvays came out with a record that finally is large enough to contain the band’s splendor. Every song on Blue Rev is a feast, done up with effortless élan. It is a deep dive through the history of pop and rock, down into the abyss of what its future might look like.
Alvvays knew the mechanics of a song inside and out on their second album, Antisocialites, but now they are masters of their craft. Blue Rev is absolutely lousy with bridges and middle-8s that give even the album cuts a sense of stakes and momentum. They’ll do the Pixies’ quiet-loud-quiet thing, then a big gaudy key change straight out of a country tune, then bring in some of Kevin Shields’ famous “glide guitar” technique, then Rankin will belt out a note like it’s Adele karaoke night, then the band will bring it down to do a synth-led psychedelic song about a reply-guy in your mentions. This wide-ranging, recombinant style is less about genre-hopping and more about the construction of the songs themselves—there’s so much care over when the chorus needs to go up the octave, when the guitar solo needs to come screaming in, when the key needs to modulate, when the rhythm section needs to drop out. Any band can borrow a style, but when Alvvays builds these songs from the treasured blueprints of bands like Lush and the Lilys, they feel monumental from the very first listen.