Blue Rev

Making it

The band began writing almost immediately after Antisocialites. A thief stole a recorder holding several of Rankin's demos, and the day after, a flood threatened the band's gear. Then the pandemic closed borders, so the band could not rehearse as a full group. In early 2020 they had been on tour with the Strokes and had booked time at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, but had to go home. They reconvened in October 2021 with the producer Shawn Everett, a fellow Canadian, who urged them to forget careful planning and play straight to tape. On the second day they played the album front to back twice, with 15 seconds between songs and 30 minutes between full takes.

Everett ran the tracks through a tape machine that was technically broken but produced a sound he liked, and he said every mix he printed came out slightly different. The band stayed up for days to meet a vinyl pressing plant's deadline and delivered the album around 8 a.m. on the day it fell. Rankin said they did not want it to sound expensive, like a big, spacious, glossy synth record. The title is the sweet vodka cooler Rankin and MacLellan drank as teenagers on Cape Breton, and the Pitchfork profile adds that it could also be read as rêve, French for dream.

The music

Pitchfork's Larson heard the quiet-loud-quiet of the Pixies, a country key change, Kevin Shields's glide guitar and a synth-led song about a reply guy, and said the style was less about genre-hopping than about how carefully the songs were built. Rankin and O'Hanley wrote the songs together with MacLellan. Rankin credits Haruki Murakami's After the Quake for the approach to After the Earthquake and says Very Online Guy was never meant as a comment on the internet. The Guardian noted that one song is named after Television's Tom Verlaine and that Belinda Says quotes Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is a Place on Earth.

Reception

The album holds a Metacritic average of 86 from 15 reviews. Pitchfork gave it 8.8 and Best New Music, NME four stars, Clash 8 of 10, Exclaim 9 of 10, and Paste 8.4 of 10. NME's Will Richards called it a subtle but satisfying expansion. Rolling Stone ranked it 12th among the best albums of 2022 and the Guardian 25th. It reached 61 on the Billboard 200, 3 on the Billboard Alternative chart, 8 on the Billboard independent and rock charts, 75 in Canada, 6 in Scotland and 2 on the UK independent chart. It won the Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize.