In one of the more damning passages of Liz Pelly’s new Spotify exposé, Mood Machine, Darius Van Arman—co-founder and co-owner of Secretly Group, an indie conglomerate that’s home to Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, and Bon Iver—says that, upon the advent of streaming in the United States, labels like his realized they had to sign acts that warranted “repeat listens in coffee shops.” Spare a thought, then, for Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley, the seafaring married couple who make up the long-running indie-pop duo Tennis: They were making tunes that sounded great in Anthropologie long before the likes of Maya Hawke and Boygenius trendified Starbucks CD music for bisexual teens. That their placeless, timeless blend of Laurel Canyon folk, 1980s pop, and 2010s dream-pop revival isn’t more popular strikes partly as a matter of exceptionally bad timing: Tennis’ gauzy 2011 debut Cape Dory couldn’t hold its own against more personality-driven compatriots like Best Coast and Kurt Vile; by the time they graduated to more distinctive songs like 2020’s “Need Your Love,” a bulbous, sugary retro-pop track with an alarming beat switch, all anyone wanted was the hazy, soporific pop they used to play.
Tennis’ new record, Face Down in the Garden, is also their last: After completing the album, they said in a statement, “It became clear that we had said everything we wanted to say and achieved everything we wanted to achieve with our band … We are ready to pursue other creative projects and to make space in our lives for new things.” It contains one of the duo’s best songs, the intoxicating “12 Blown Tires,” and is, as ever, sumptuously produced, with every gentle drum fill and twinkly synth hit rendered in admirable hi-fi. It’s exceedingly pleasant and, often, little more—a great record to just put on, as a matter of lifestyle.
But it’s not an album that’s likely to hit particularly deeply, in part due to the way Tennis’ lyrics overshoot universality: Often, Moore is expressing feelings general enough to adorn a greeting card, or relaying the kind of story that’s too unremarkable to tell a friend. Although “At the Apartment” opens with unadorned, slightly dull specificity (“We lay on the floor/Dissecting every sound on some old 45”), the song’s second half contorts into something more abstract as Moore’s words take on surreal urgency: “Takes more to be your man/I’m the one who understands/Sleep tight, blue dunes/Blue ruin, salt dunes.” The same cannot be said of sequel “At the Wedding,” which devotes its four verses to a blow-by-blow account of what sounds like a mostly anodyne occasion. “At the wedding you refused to dance/Because the music was all wrong/And you added ‘Neither of us dances anyway,’” sings Moore. It is the kind of rich, shiny vintage R&B song that will sound perfect during a wedding montage in a Prime Original. And the lyrics are plain enough that you won’t take your eyes off Sydney Sweeney.
This particular genre of clean-cut pleasantness is often dismissed as “vibe music,” in a pejorative sense, which does a disservice to the bands who choose to follow this path: In a world increasingly starved of good vibe, why fight those who dedicate their lives to creating it? Tennis, though, offer little more than vibe. Montreal’s TOPS, one of the best “vibe bands,” make music that’s sexy and earthy, inviting you to marvel at Riley Fleck’s slick drumming and Jane Penny’s dedication to making flute solos cool. Mr Twin Sister are essentially imagining what would happen if aliens, intent on assimilation, tried to remake disco and house hits of yore. Face Down in the Garden lacks this sense of intention; “I Can Only Describe You” captures an interesting tension between apathy and horniness, but never so sharply that it feels like it’s saying something new. On “12 Blown Tires,” the best song here, Moore makes a head-over-heels crush sound positively soporific, as if attraction were so strong that it became more like a trance. But even the album’s most notable song still doesn’t feel distinct from its peers. This is how Tennis sail into the sunset: as likeable and as intoxicatingly smooth as ever.
