Molly Rankin can now boost that her band Alvvays is a Grammy-nominated act.
Just don’t expect her to do so.
“Yeah, that’s a good thing for the parents to have those little milestones, I think,” the singer-songwriter-guitarist says of the Grammy nomination. “I mean, it blows us away to be included in certain lists or awards or anything like that.
“But the expectation has never been that any of that would happen. So, everything has just been icing to us as far as being recognized in that way.”
Still, the Canadian indie-pop act did turn up in Los Angeles for the 2024 Grammy Award show, where its tune “Belinda Says” (from 2022’s “Blue Rev”) ended up losing to Paramore’s “This Is Why” in the category of best alternative music performance.
“We went and had no hope of winning,” Rankin says. “We just went for fun and we didn’t have to think about monitor mixes or performing or gear. We just got to put on some suits and take it all in as bystanders.”
Yet, the nomination — in a category that also included such industry heavyweights as Lana Del Rey, Boygenius and Arctic Monkeys — was another major sign of how highly regarded Alvvays is in 2024.
Another indicator will be the big crowd that is expected to show up to see the Prince Edward Island-born band when it headlines the 2,800-capacity Fox Theater in Oakland on Friday, Aug. 16. The Beths are also on the bill. Showtime is 8 p.m. and tickets start at $47 (subject to change), ticketmaster.com.
Besides still supporting the excellent “Blue Rev,” Rankin and company — keyboardist Kerri MacLellan, bassist Lukas Cheung, guitarist Alec O’Hanley and drummer Sheridan Riley — are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the band’s widely acclaimed self-titled debut from 2014.
That was the album that earned Alvvays the first of three Polaris Music Prize nominations — given out annually to the best Canadian full-length album of the year — and firmly established it among the coolest indie-pop acts on the planet.
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Yet, looking back with 10 year’s worth of hindsight, Rankin sounds a bit amazed that first album ever even saw the light of day.
“We’ve created every record like it’s our last try,” she says. “And I definitely felt that with the first album. We just never knew if we were ever going to release it or finish it, because we just didn’t have the technical skills to take that on.”
Still, the album sounds great — really great — superbly showcasing the band’s sturdy, glimmering mix of alternative rock and pop styles.
“We mixed that record for so long, just trying to make it sound the way that we wanted it to sound,” Rankin comments. “It just felt very fraught at the time. And we all had multiple jobs that we were holding down to try and live in Toronto.
“It just seemed like a pipe dream. The fact that that record came out still thrills me.”
It was Chad VanGaalen who helped turn that pipe dream to a reality. The acclaimed Canadian indie-rock musician, who is also an animator and visual artist, produced the album.
“We had listened to his records for awhile before we met him and worked with him,” Rankin says. “His illustrations are so incredible, so for him to let us come into his universe and work with us — we were pretty starstruck by him.”
To help mark the 10th anniversary of “Alvvays,” the band plans to release a remastered vinyl-only reissue of the album on Nov. 15.
“I do hear a lot of youth in the vocals and a lot of space, just because we weren’t really a band so we didn’t know what we even wanted to track,” Rankin says of listening to that first album 10 years after it was released. “The songs seem naive, in an appealing way to me.”
Otherwise, she says the band’s sound hasn’t changed all that much over the course of a decade.
“We do still have, you know, like the same keyboard blanketing everything we do, the same sound and the wall of guitar — I don’t think that has changed very much,” she says. “And there is really nothing much I can do about the sound of my vocal, so that’s not changed very much either.”
