In the five years that have elapsed since the release of Alvvays’ second album, Antisocialites, and their long-awaited third, Blue Rev, the Toronto-via-PEI band had to deal with every possible roadblock a band could face: lineup changes, demo thefts, gear-destroying basement floods—and that was before the pandemic. But fitting for a group who’ve always channelled life’s disappointments into songs brimming with wry humour and anthemic resolve, Alvvays emerge from those setbacks sounding thoroughly revitalized. While the band remain dedicated students of ’80s UK indie pop (check the simply Marr-vellous jangle of “Pressed”), they’ve also become a more sonically expansive entity, tricking out the opener, “Pharmacist,” with a euphoric shoegaze overdrive and following Blonde Redhead’s neon-lined pathway into Euro synth-pop cabaret on “Very Online Guy.” But at the core of each song remains Molly Rankin’s captivatingly mercurial voice, which manages to convey unshakable strength, sardonic social commentary, and eternal sadness all at once. And that’s never more true than on “Belinda Says,” a poignant account of an unplanned pregnancy that invokes the namesake Go-Go’s singer, both as a beacon of hope and as an emblem of how, in times of great upheaval, pop music’s ingrained optimism sometimes just isn’t enough. “Bеlinda says that heaven is a place on еarth,” Rankin sings, before speaking to her own experience: “Well, so is hell.”