By Nicole Villeneuve

Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.

Like a ray of pop-nostalgia sunshine, the new self-released, self-titled EP from Everything All The Time finds its way into our sad-bastard acoustic hearts this week. It’s a committed pop record that is technically pretty removed from a lot of the easy indie rock cop-outs that get thrown at the messy-haired, bespectacled sextet, but don’t be afraid—they keep the conventions and the company (oh, and live drums), so no one will ever know.
More 1980s Top 40 radio than club bangers, this handful of songs follows a standard verse-chorus-verse structure that vocalist Alanna Stuart commands sweetly and effortlessly with her—go figure—actual singing voice. If it weren’t for the small and quirky moments, such as the multi-vocal breakdown in “Losing My Mind” or the much-contemplated and carefully placed percussion and horn intricacies of “Lazy Days” (streaming above) that a (totally dissimilar) band like Chicago’s Anathallo have down to a fine stop-start art, Everything All The Time would have nothing but their wardrobe keeping them in the indie rock realm. Where other upbeat indie-electro acts might add synths to a crunchy guitar base, Everything All The Time sticks to a light sound that occasionally gets punched up with some grumbling synthetic bass/guitar grooves, like in the Green Go-meets-Thunderheist faux-raunch of “Start Stop.”
If Shout Out Out Out Out’s trance jams can chart country-wide and Metric’s over-processed same-old can still be called interesting, Everything All The Time’s cute charm and attention to detail ought to win over a good chunk of fans. Even the ones who keep it a dirty secret.
Everything All The Time officially release their self-titled EP all by themselves with a must-see live set at the Drake Hotel on Friday, October 23 at 8 p.m. ($5).