In 1998, Tegan and Sara caused a small stir when they won a Calgary, Alberta talent contest called Garage Warz. The identical twins appeared on a local news segment to talk excitedly about their win, draped in capacious clothing and distinguishable by Sara’s long hair and Tegan’s lip piercing. “The thing that I like the best,” said Sara, “is that, I don’t think that [the judges] think, ‘Wow, they’re perfect, they [need] no improvement’... I think they just see maybe a sparkle of something, that can get to be something bigger.”
Even in her wide-eyed hopefulness, Sara probably didn’t imagine that the duo would go on to have a storied 20-year career: first as Canadian grunge-folk darlings, then pop-punk rebels embraced by the White Stripes and Paramore, and later as synth-pop troubadours joining Taylor Swift onstage. On Tegan and Sara’s ninth studio album, Hey, I'm Just Like You—and the simultaneously released High School, a co-written memoir about their time dropping acid and moshing to Green Day in the ’90s—they revisit their roots, re-recording demos they wrote as teenagers. This time, they’re both the open-hearted teenage songwriters and the wiser industry professionals who can spot, and expand on, their spark.
It’s a smart move for a band whose fan base has both aged with them, and continually refreshed itself with younger members. At a Tegan and Sara show, you’re as likely to meet women in their 30s or 40s who have been die-hard fans of the trailblazing LGBTQ icons since the opening guitar strums of “You Wouldn’t Like Me” in 2004 as you are to meet younger listeners who caught the wave with their 2016 breakthrough pop hit “Boyfriend.” On Hey, I’m Just Like You, the band seem to acknowledge and speak to each of these audiences at once. Listening to the title track in its plaintive, unvarnished demo form, it’s clear that it was written by the same two girls who, as described in their memoir, once built a shrine to Kurt Cobain. On the album, the song opens with sharp claps, and builds to a synth-spangled chorus that cushions the jagged melancholy of the original in a pop cocoon.
As well as reconciling their different sounds, the album is a fierce reminder of the twins’ ability to write an irresistible chorus. Particularly memorable ones here include the stadium-sized exhalation of “I Don’t Owe You Anything,” the bratty moshpit-lite chorus of “Hold My Breath Until I Die,” and the angst-ridden, fist-pumping “I Know I’m Not the Only One.” On “Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie),” a clunky title becomes a surprisingly great refrain when the song breaks open, halfway through, into a widescreen anthemic surge.
“Don’t Believe…” is not the album’s only clunky phrasing. Glancing through the track list is like flicking through a teen’s journal, with its powerful “get off my case, Mom” energy. The album’s general embrace of Tegan and Sara’s teenage earnestness is mostly its strength, but there are moments that grate: the “hello, hello, hello” hook on “Hello, I’m Right Here” carries strange hints of the “British whine” that Sara recalls their teenage voices carrying in High School. On the electronic bounce of “You Go Away and I Don’t Mind,” the stripped-back production gives the juvenile, baffling opening lyrics (“I’m complicated, I was raised by icons”) nowhere to hide.
On “Don’t Believe…,” however, they strike the right balance between the clumsy originality of the song that Sara says she wrote in 1995, at age 15, and the polished pros they are now. The melodrama of the chorus (“I belong”) is muted, filtering the pain of teenagerhood through refined adult tastes. There’s a radical kind of self-acceptance to honoring your goofy and heartbreaking teenage sentiments with such seriousness. Sara recently told the Guardian that she has a lot of “self-hatred” and “internalized homophobia” stemming from her difficult high school years, but that revisiting the music and memories of the time—rather than embarrassing her as much as she expected—helped her to love herself. “I’m so amazed at what that person accomplished, knowing that inside they were really, really damaged.”
The fact that these songs have been interpreted by their writers 20 years later creates a layer of knowing poignancy, such as when Tegan sings, “I wonder if someday, we'll just be a memory?” on “I Know I’m Not...,” or when Sara sings “What if I become all of the horrible things that I said I would never be?” on the delicate “Please Help Me.” The sting of their adolescent fears is softened both by the heightened shimmer of the production, and by the very fact that we know how this story ends. Compare the gentle, winking nature of the line “Right now, I wish I was older” on “Hello, I’m Right Here,” to the brute force of Billie Eilish—still in the thick of all-encompassing young turmoil—singing about wishing she could be someone else. Memories of the very real pain and passion we felt as teenagers become cool enough to touch when we’re older. In Tegan and Sara’s hands, they become mantras, glimmering and hopeful and full of sparkle.
Buy: Rough Trade
