In February 2024, just shy of the tenth anniversary of Alvvays' self-titled debut, it's second song and single, "Archie, Marry Me," reached a rarified threshold for our streaming age-one-hundred million listens through a single platform. For the world's biggest pop stars that's an average achievement, but for an upstart indie rock band then writing in a backroad farmhouse on a Canadian island, it represented a staggering proof of connection and widespread resonance. Makes sense, after all: "Archie, Marry Me" is a softly stinging, pointedly funny portrait of a common end-of-youth predicament-to wed or not to wed, to involve the state and the possibility of financial ruin when you're already saddled with student loans and just trying to survive. Instantly relatable, it is an anthem about prescribed social expectations and delighting, however noncommittally, in outcast status.
Now remastered and reissued with deep cut "Underneath Us" to mark a glorious decade of deadpan jangle, Alvvays feels that way from end to end-literally, from the opening stalking-you-with-love anthem "Adult Diversion" to the ennui escapism of sci-fi closer "Red Planet." In a little more than 30 minutes, Alvvays give us a song about loving someone to actual death ("Next of Kin"), how keeping secrets will destroy what you think you want ("The Agency Group"), and another incisive song about the societal demands of love and marriage ("Atop a Cake"). When Molly Rankin, Alec O'Hanley, Kerri MacLellan, and Brian Murphy cut these songs with Chad VanGaalen in 2013, long before they had a record deal, they were, in fact, young adults trying to figure out these encroaching exigencies for themselves. Again, these problems don't age; some of us just happen to be lucky enough to age out of them. Little of this would matter if the songs themselves didn't stick, if the melodies weren't as timeless as the topics. But the tension between Alvvays' shimmer and snap and Rankin's knowingly droll delivery connects these numbers to a brilliant and deep rock continuum, from the glories of C86 and the triumphs of Athens in the '80s to Celtic folk's own magnetic candour. Each of these songs lands several hooks apiece: the sparkling drum-machine drift of "Dives," the noise-caked sway of "The Agency Group," and, of course, the half-diffident and half-confident matrimonial plea of "Archie, Marry Me" and that pearly guitar lick. Ten years ago or ten years from now, here are ten songs to slip in your pocket and pull out when the decisions of the world seem to swirl like the very guitars that shape them.