How Do I Get Close To You

Alvvays “Adult Diversion”

My relationship with twee and “indie pop” has always been a little tricky. I mean, I definitely love particularly artists in that realm, but for the most part I have no particular sentimentality or reverence for that canon. I tend to think of indie pop artists as cutesy underachievers with a willfully narrow range of musical influences. In other words, a song in this genre needs to be exceptionally well made and charming to appeal to me. This song is one of those: The tonality and melodic style is familiar, but the execution is fantastic. Like a lot of the best songs in this genre, it’s effective partly because the wistful tone of the song matches the relatively small emotional scale of the lyrics. This is basically just a song about a crush, and not even a particularly intense one. She’s trying to understand it, but there’s no particular urgency. This could be a bad thing for some songs, something that forces your to think “who cares???”, but “Adult Diversion” really connects with the vague pleasure that comes with having this kind of non-problem in your life.

Buy it from Amazon.