Today, JUNO Award winning Toronto-based outfit Alvvays announce their spring 2023 tour in support of their globally acclaimed third studio album Blue Rev, out now via Polyvinyl Records/Celsius Girls. Kicking off in Ottawa on March 2, the tour will make its way across Canada before wrapping at Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom on March 17th.
The Toronto quintet are currently on the road for their fall tour in support of Blue Rev, recently wrapping dates in the UK and travelling through the United States and South America before ending the year at home with back-to-back shows at Toronto’s HISTORY.
2023 SPRING TOUR
March 2 – Ottawa, ON – Bronson Centre
March 3 – Montreal, QC – MTELUS
March 4 – London, ON – London Music Hall
March 5 – Detroit, MI – Majestic Theatre
March 8 – Winnipeg, MB – Burton Cummings Theatre
March 9 – Saskatoon, SK – Coors Event Centre
March 10 – Edmonton, AB – Midway Music Hall
March 11 – Calgary, AB – MacEwan Hall
March 13 – Spokane, WA – Knitting Factory
March 15 – Victoria, BC – Capital Ballroom
March 16 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom
March 17 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom
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 their 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 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.
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.
2022 FALL TOUR DATES
October 26 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore ^ [SOLD OUT]
October 27 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore ^ [SOLD OUT]
October 28 – Pomona, CA – Glass House ^
October 29 – Los Angeles, CA – The Wiltern ^ [SOLD OUT]
October 30 – San Diego, CA – Observatory North Park ^ [SOLD OUT]
November 02 – Austin, TX – Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater ^
November 04 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall – Downstairs ^
November 05 – Dallas, TX – The Studio at The Factory ^
November 07 – Atlanta, GA – Variety Playhouse ^ [SOLD OUT]
November 08 – Nashville, TN – Marathon Music Works ^
November 09 – Asheville, NC – Orange Peel ^
November 11 – Washington, DC – 9:30 Club ^ [SOLD OUT]
November 12 – Philadelphia, PA – Franklin Music Hall ^
November 15 – New Haven, CT – College Street Music Hall ^
November 16 – New York, NY – Kings Theater ^
November 18 – Boston, MA – Roadrunner ^
December 7 – Santiago, CL – Fauna Primavera Festival
December 10 – Buenos Aires, AR – Music Wins Festival
December 11 – São Paulo, BR – Balaclava Fest
December 15 – Toronto, ON – History ^
December 16 – Toronto, ON – History ^ [SOLD OUT]
^ w/ Slow Pulp
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