Alvvays performs Belinda Says on Fallon after releasing instant-classic album Blue Rev
2023 World Tour Dates:
03/01 - Ottawa, ON @ Bronson Centre
03/02 - Ottawa, ON @ Bronson Centre [SOLD OUT]
03/03 - Montreal, QC @ MTELUS
03/04 - London, ON @ London Music Hall
03/05 - Detroit, MI @ Majestic
03/08 - Winnipeg, MB @ Burton Cummings Theatre
03/09 - Saskatoon, SK @ Coors Event Centre
03/10 - Edmonton, AB @ Midway
03/11 - Calgary, AB @ MacEwan Hall
03/13 - Spokane, WA @ Knitting Factory
03/15 - Victoria, BC @ Capital Ballroom
03/16 - Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom
03/17 - Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom [SOLD OUT]
05/24 - London, UK @ Forum
05/25 - London, UK @ Forum
05/27 - Bristol, UK @ Dot To Dot Festival
05/28 - Nottingham, UK @ Dot To Dot Festival
05/30 - Manchester, UK @ New Century
05/31 - Glasgow, UK @ Galvanizers
06/02 - Barcelona, Spain @ Primavera Sound
06/04 - Paris, France @ Trabendo
06/05 - Brussels, Belgium @ Botanique
06/06 - Berlin, Germany @ Astra Kulturhaus
06/08 - Porto, Portugal @ Primavera Sound
06/09 - Madrid, Spain @ Primavera Sound
2022 was a groundbreaking year for Alvvays with the band releasing Blue Rev, their critically acclaimed, instant-classic album. There was an onslaught of attention on year end lists including “Belinda Says” being named the #1 song of the year by Pitchfork, #1 on Stereogum’s official and reader’s poll album of the year lists, and they took the #1 spot on FLOOD Magazine, Good Morning America, and Exclaim’s lists as well.
With all of that in their rearview, 2023 is already set to be another massive year for the Canadian quintet who made their late night TV debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night. Performing “Belinda Says” the band ripped through the beloved song accompanied by a string trio proving 2023 will be the year of Alvvays domination.
Alvvays will be touring extensively in 2023 with Canadian, UK, and European dates already announced. The full list of tour dates can be found below.
More on Blue Rev…
Alvvays never intended to take five years to finish their third album, the nervy joyride that is the compulsively lovable Blue Rev. In fact, the band began writing and cutting its first bits soon after releasing 2017’s Antisocialites, that stunning sophomore record that confirmed the Toronto quintet’s status atop a new generation of winning and whip-smart indie rock.
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 masterful new one, drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell.
The songs of Blue Rev thrive on immediacy and intricacy, so good on first listen that the subsequent spins where you hear all the details are an inevitability. This perfectly dovetailed sound stems from an unorthodox—and, for Alvvays, wholly surprising—recording process, unlike anything they’ve ever done. Alvvays are fans of fastidious demos, making maps of new tunes so complete they might as well have topographical contour lines.
But 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 in rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country's past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become.
Sure, it arrives a few years later than expected, but the answer for Alvvays is actually simple: They’ve changed gradually, growing on Blue Rev into one of their generation’s most complete and riveting rock bands.