There’s a certain kind of album that sounds like it was made by people who knew exactly how much reverb was too much and used it anyway, and Protector is that album.
Molly Rankin grew up in Cape Breton in a musical family — her father Raylene’s band The Rankins were basically Canadian folk royalty — and you can hear someone who absorbed melody the way other kids absorb television. She moved to Toronto, fell in with a group of musicians who’d been orbiting the same downtown scene, and somewhere around 2012 the band came together in a way that felt less like formation and more like weather.
The Sound They Were After
The debut self-titled record came first, in 2014, and Protector arrived two years later to sharpen what that first album had only sketched. The band — Rankin on vocals, Alec O’Hanley on guitar, Brian Murphy on keys, Abbey Pak on bass, and Phil MacIsaac on drums — went into Candle Recording in Toronto with John Etheridge behind the glass. What Etheridge understood, and what makes this record hold up, is that the fuzz and shimmer aren’t decoration. They’re structural.
O’Hanley’s guitar work is the real secret here. He’s not doing anything technically complicated, but his instinct for the moment when a line should bend rather than resolve is uncanny. “Forget About Life” opens the record with a tremolo that sounds like it’s being played inside a wave, and the song never lets go of you. It just recedes and comes back, recedes and comes back, the way the actual ocean does if you’ve spent any time near one.
MacIsaac’s drumming is worth paying attention to. There’s a restraint to it that a lot of indie records of this era lacked — he hits hard when it matters and steps back when it doesn’t, and you don’t notice how good that is until you’ve heard a worse version of the same song on a lesser record.
What “Atop a Cake” Actually Does
The centerpiece is “Atop a Cake,” and I’ll just say it plainly: it’s one of the better pop songs to come out of Canada in the last twenty years. Rankin’s lyric is absurdist and romantic in equal measure, Murphy’s Farfisa-adjacent keyboard line sits just low enough in the mix that it feels half-imagined, and the whole thing is over in under three minutes without ever feeling rushed. That’s a specific skill. Most bands spend their entire careers failing to learn it.
The production sits somewhere in a lineage that runs from Sarah Records through early Beach House, but it never sounds derivative. The reverb is wet but not murky. The bass is present without being aggressive. Everything has been given room to breathe and nobody tried to fill that room with something unnecessary.
“Archie, Marry Me” is the song most people came in on, and rightly so — it’s a near-perfect piece of work, and the fact that it sounds effortless is the most deceptive thing about it. Rankin has said the song was written quickly, almost as a joke, and that’s the kind of origin story that should make any working songwriter a little angry.
The record closes with “Ones Who Love You,” which is slower and more patient than anything that preceded it, and leaves you somewhere quieter than where you started. Not resolved, exactly. Just quieter.
Put this on after the kid is in bed. Put it on when the house is dark except for the kitchen light. It was made for exactly that.