Tennis is one of those bands that never quite took off, but somehow always maintained a steadily solid reputation through sheer consistency. Fronted by singer Alaina Moore and her husband Patrick Riley, the Denver-born indie-rock pairing fashioned themselves as a kind of modern-day, alternative twin to the Carpenters (they even covered “Superstar” to really drive home the parallels). Their gentle, sun-dappled sound was slight and low-key but reliably balmy and accessible, the perfect mood-setter for a backyard shindig, a summer day at the beach, or a late night at a loungey bar. With Moore’s featherlight warble snugly complementing Riley’s very pretty compositions, Tennis found their groove early on and stuck to it, subtly refining their craft over time while retaining their cushy softness and adoration for swooning ‘50s pop and breezy ‘70s rock.
Their indefinite hiatus, announced just two weeks before the release of their latest and ostensibly final record Face Down in the Garden, marks yet another loss in the gradually declining class of nostalgia-tinged, lo-fi indie-rock duos that emerged in the early 2010s, like Best Coast and Girlpool. In their joint statement, Moore mentioned that multiple setbacks during touring for their previous album, 2023’s Pollen, led to this decision. Bummer that it is, sometimes it’s best to end something when it makes the most sense, especially when it seems like the universe is giving you clear signs to move on.
The blue tone of Face Down in the Garden is certainly fitting in that regard. The album carries the same pleasantly midtempo and brisk energy that saturates most of Tennis’s discography, but the band’s dissolution brings a more poignant touch to the despondent attitude and wistful longing in Moore’s lyrics and Riley’s instrumentation. Across Face Down in the Garden’s nine tracks, you can sense the two wanting to call it quits, evoking the same kind of defeated but necessary acceptance one experiences when ending a meaningful, long-term relationship or leaving their hometown behind. But don’t let the funereal vibes fool you into thinking Tennis has given up completely or gone full dour mode.
Though it might not reach the relative greatness of 2014’s Ritual in Repeat or 2017’s Yours Conditionally, arguably their most accomplished and resonant records, Face Down in the Garden is still an affecting, mature work. Considering the multitude of complications Moore and Riley faced leading up to making this LP—a chronic illness, an attempted robbery at sea, a blown tire that gets a shoutout in the title of the penultimate track—perhaps it deserves a little slack for staying at a somber simmer instead of going out with a bang.
While the lightly downbeat scope does occasionally inhibit the album from truly taking off, the sneaky emotional charge smuggled underneath Tennis’s modest presentation often rouses in unexpected ways, particularly on “At the Wedding,” a richly written, sung, and produced song that channels Moore and Riley’s existential anxiety through a fictionalized story of attending a wedding together. Over passionate, twinkly piano notes, Moore expresses both the anguish that such an event provokes (“I tell myself, I tell myself to be better / This hour is lasting forever”) and the potential tailspin it can cause within her relationship (“I’ve been trying not to be so overconfident / And you agreed, that used to be enough for me”).
On “I Can Only Describe You,” one of the album’s shortest tracks but also one of its best, Moore fully tilts back into a state of intense romantic yearning, her voice bathed in gorgeous, psychedelic production. “12 Blown Tires,” perhaps one of their most nakedly autobiographical offerings, finds Moore admitting her faults (“Making excuses looking back / I’m getting good at ignoring the past”) as Riley mixes plaintive acoustic and electric guitar riffs reminiscent of early Beach House. This throughline of honesty gives enlightening and welcome insight into Moore’s feelings about her relationship with Riley, adding further weight to the album’s thematic preoccupation with the difficulty of departures.
A longtime Tennis fan such as myself does somewhat wish Moore and Riley tried something a little more ambitious in this last outing rather than stay comfortably in the same relaxed lane they’ve been driving in for so long, but the duo does add some engaging, subtle flourishes that suggest they’re at least still playing around with their formula a bit. Opener “At the Apartment” starts with jazzy piano and drums before Moore launches into a kind of sensual sing-speak with the same purring cadence as Lana Del Rey. “Weight of Desire” goes heavy on plush, cascading ‘80s synths and ghostly, sonorous reverb, almost like they recorded the tune inside a cave.
Most notably, Face Down in the Garden concludes with the wordless “In Love (Release the Doves),” where Moore’s breathy, angelic self-harmonizing hovers over tense, churning drums that slowly build to a bittersweet synth line. For a group that thrived off having an infectiously enchanting, almost heavenly sound, it’s appropriate and natural to complete what could be their last song with just that, a sonic approximation to a soul leaving a body after death. Though Tennis may be over, their spirit, they seem to suggest, will live on.
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.
