Alvvays Co-Wrote and Produced a Miley Cyrus Single
End of the World, the third single from Miley Cyrus’s Something Blue, carries co-writing and co-production credits for Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley. They are two-fifths of Alvvays, a Canadian band who have spent a decade making some of the most admired guitar pop in the world without ever appearing on a mainstream pop chart.
The song came out on 4 April 2025. Jonathan Rado of Foxygen also has a writing credit, and Shawn Everett produced. That last name is the whole explanation.
The Producer Is the Connection
Everett produced Blue Rev, Alvvays’ third album, in Los Angeles in October 2021. He had also worked with Cyrus on I Used To Be Young, and on II Most Wanted with Beyoncé.
Collaborations between indie bands and stadium pop artists are usually presented as a meeting of admirers. This one has a more prosaic and more believable mechanism: a producer who had recently spent months with both parties put them in the same room. The credit list is a working relationship rather than a fan letter.
It Sounds Like Them
The finished record is not an Alvvays song with a famous singer on it, but it is recognisably theirs. Billboard described gentle acoustic guitar, an insistent synth bass and punctuating piano chords that could have come from an ABBA track, over a slight haziness in the production that the writer identified as pure Alvvays, recalling Dreams Tonite and Velveteen.
That haze is the band’s actual signature and the hardest thing about them to reproduce. It is not reverb applied at the end; it comes from how the guitars and the vocal are recorded in the first place. Hearing it under a Miley Cyrus vocal is the clearest evidence that Rankin and O’Hanley were in the room rather than on an email chain.
What They Are Known For
Blue Rev arrived on 7 October 2022 through Polyvinyl, Transgressive and Celsius Girls, fourteen tracks in thirty-nine minutes. Pharmacist opens it at just over two minutes; Fourth Figure closes it at eighty seconds. In between sit Easy on Your Own?, After the Earthquake, Tom Verlaine, Very Online Guy, Velveteen, Pomeranian Spinster, Belinda Says and Bored in Bristol.
It is named after Rev, a Canadian alcoholic drink, which sets the register accurately. Metacritic settled at 86. Pitchfork gave 8.8 and Best New Music, with Jeremy D. Larson writing that every song on it is a feast done up with effortless élan. AllMusic gave four and a half stars and Exclaim! gave nine out of ten.
It won Alternative Album of the Year at the 2023 Juno Awards and was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize. Belinda Says was nominated for Best Alternative Music Performance at the 66th Grammy Awards. Commercially it reached sixty-one on the Billboard 200 and three on US Top Alternative Albums.
A Stolen Recorder and a Flooded Basement
The album nearly did not survive its own making. A thief took a recorder containing the demos, and a basement flood then threatened the band’s equipment. Losing demos is a particular kind of disaster for a group whose songs depend on arrangement detail worked out in advance rather than on studio improvisation.
What emerged is unusually dense for a record of that length. Fourteen songs at under three minutes each means almost no repetition and no extended outros, and the band’s stated reference points, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fanclub and Yo La Tengo, describe three different approaches to the same problem of how loud a pop song can be before the melody stops working.
Why Everett Was the Right Producer
Rankin has been specific about what he brought. She has praised his sense of moments of impact, noted that he is a musician in his own right, and identified the quality that matters most in a producer: he is not afraid to be rejected, which she called extremely important.
That last point describes a working method rather than a personality. A producer willing to propose ideas that will be turned down generates far more material than one managing a band’s feelings, and it only functions if the artists are decisive enough to say no. Rankin has described the process between herself and O’Hanley of reaching the same opinion about where a song ended up versus what the demo sounded like as a process in itself.
The sessions were not comfortable. She has recalled nights when she, O’Hanley, Kerri MacLellan and Everett simply did not sleep. Her stated goal was to make the record more reflective of the live show, adding that they can be a pretty aggressive band, which is not how a listener who knows only the singles would describe them.
Ten Years to Gold
Archie, Marry Me, from their 2014 debut, was certified gold in 2024. A decade between release and certification is a precise description of how this band’s audience has grown: slowly, through word of mouth and repeated listening, rather than through a moment.
That pattern explains why a pop co-write is worth reporting rather than shrugging at. Rankin and O’Hanley have never had a hit under their own name, and a song on a major pop album is the first time their writing will reach a chart audience directly.
Rankin has described the whole trajectory as incremental, noting that the debut album was out for roughly a year before touring really began, and that when they started they could not get a show at all. The strategy, as she tells it, was to crack into other regions and find out whether they could sustain themselves, on the reasoning that staying in Canada and being a Canadian band can be limiting.
She is also unusually unsentimental about recognition, saying she never wants to feel entitled to an award or a review, and that expecting anything has not been the right approach. Asked about Grammy night, she said they were excited to put on an outfit and sit in a seat for six hours.
Writing for Somebody Else
The interesting question is what a band like this brings to a commission. Alvvays songs are built on a specific tension between plain, almost conversational lyrics and arrangements that keep threatening to overwhelm them, and the effect depends on Rankin’s own delivery, which is deliberately unemphatic.
Handing that construction to a singer with an enormous, characterful voice removes the central mechanism. What survives, on the evidence of End of the World, is the harmonic language and the production haze rather than the vocal restraint, which is probably the correct thing to keep.
The Wider Pattern
Indie bands supplying material to major pop artists is no longer unusual, but it usually runs one way, with the indie act treated as a source of texture. What is different here is that Rankin and O’Hanley took production credits as well as writing ones, which means they shaped how the record sounds rather than only what it says.
It puts them in the position Wet Leg reached by treating their own presentation as part of the work: a band whose specific competence, rather than their fame, is what the wider industry wants. Alvvays have been quietly excellent for a decade. The pop world took a while to notice, and when it did, it hired them to produce.
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