Alvvays have announced their new album Blue Rev will drop on be released via Polyvinyl on October 7th, 2022. The album, is the band’s first in five years, 2017’s Antisocialites. Along with the news, Alvvays has shared the single “Pharmacist.” Last month they teased their return by announcing their 2022 fall tour. The tour will start in Chicago this October and hit most US markets. They are also scheduled to play Courtney Barnett’s ‘Here and There Festival’ in August.

Global lockdowns notwithstanding, circumstances both ordinary and entirely unpredictable stunted those sessions. Alvvays toured more than expected, a surefire interruption for a band that doesn’t write on the road. A watchful thief then broke into singer Molly Rankin’s apartment and swiped a recorder full of demos, one day before a basement flood nearly ruined all the band’s gear. They subsequently lost a rhythm section and, due to border closures, couldn’t rehearse for months with their new one, drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell.

In October 2021, when they arrived at a Los Angeles studio with fellow Canadian Shawn Everett, he urged them to forget the careful planning they’d done and just play the stuff, straight to tape. On the second day, they ripped through Blue Rev front-to-back twice, pausing only 15 seconds between songs and only 30 minutes between full album takes. And then, as Everett has done on recent albums by The War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves, he spent an obsessive amount of time alongside Alvvays filling in the cracks, roughing up the surfaces, and mixing the results.

Every element of Alvvays leveled up in the long interim between albums: Riley is a classic dynamo of a drummer, with the power of a rock deity and the finesse of a jazz pedigree. Their roommate, in-demand bassist Blackwell, finds the center of a song and entrenches it. Keyboardist Kerri MacLellan joined Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley to write more this time, reinforcing the band’s collective quest to break patterns heard on their first two albums.

Alvvays’ self-titled debut, released when much of the band was still in its early 20s, offered speculation about a distant future—marriage, professionalism, interplanetary citizenship. Antisocialites wrestled with the woes of the now, especially the anxieties of inching toward adulthood. Named for the sugary alcoholic beverage Rankin and MacLellan used to drink as teens on rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become.

Alvvays 2022 Tour Dates:

08/16 – Chicago, IL @ Here and There Festival – The Salt Shed
10/14 – Chicago, IL @ Riviera Theatre $
10/15 – Minneapolis, MN @ First Ave. $
10/18 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The Depot $
10/19 – Boise, ID @ Knitting Factory $
10/20 – Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom $
10/21 – Eugene, OR @ McDonald Theatre $
10/22 – Seattle, WA @ The Moore Theatre $
10/24 – Arcata, CA @ Arcata Theatre Lounge $
10/26 – San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore $
10/27 – San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore $
10/29 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern $
10/30 – San Diego, CA @ Observatory North Park $
11/02 – Austin, TX @ Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater $
11/04 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall – Downstairs $
11/05 – Dallas, TX @ The Studio at The Factory $
11/07 – Atlanta, GA @ Variety Playhouse $
11/08 – Nashville, TN @ Marathon Music Works $
11/09 – Asheville, NC @ Orange Peel $
11/11 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club $
11/12 – Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall $
11/15 – New Haven, CT @ College Street Music Hall $
11/16 – New York, NY @ Kings Theater $
11/18 – Boston, MA @ Roadrunner $

$ w/ Slow Pulp

Pre-order Blue Rev by Alvvays HERE