Beloved indie pop duo Tennis released their final album “Face Down in the Garden” on April 25. With lush yet tasteful production and tenderly tongue-in-cheek yet affected vocals by Alaina Moore, “Face Down in the Garden” is Tennis at their best. It serves as a dignified exit that satisfies listeners yet leaves them wistful.
The happily married duo announced via their Instagram on April 11 that “Face Down in the Garden” would be their last studio album — “at least in this configuration as Tennis.” Citing it as the furthest they could develop their sound before it stopped being theirs, Moore and Patrick Riley chose to bow out at their peak rather than overstay the magic.
“We felt like we had basically pushed it as far as we could go as far as innovation, newness, challenging ourselves with our writing, before we were writing albums that couldn’t even be a Tennis album anymore,” Moore said in an interview with The Fader.
Evocative of times long gone but still intrinsically itself, “Face Down in the Garden” checks every box set out for it. The album feels like something a modern Maria Wyeth from Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays” would listen to while on one of her aimless late night endeavors down Southern California’s freeways, the top of her yellow sports car down, weighed down by life but still living.
A significant contributor to this soundscape’s infrastructure is the drum tone. Incredibly clean and punchy, the drums bring to mind the “dead drum” sound of the ‘70s. There is a temporal association only furthered by the use of bells on songs like “Through the Mirror” and the use of strings on songs like album opener and standout track “At the Apartment.”
The use, nowadays, of strings in pop music is associated with overproduction, but the strings in “At the Apartment” integrate perfectly, playing beautifully off of feathery vocal harmonies by Moore. The tenderness produced by the coplay of these two elements — supported by constantly in motion piano and a sonorous synth sub-bass — is euphorically interrupted by the entrance of tasteful yet interesting drums, a fuzzy lead and the transition of Moore to suave talk-singing.
However, not every song is as strong as “At the Apartment.” Additionally, though “Face Down in the Garden” is as close to objectively a step-up in production as one can get in something as subjective as music, the album generally lacks that raw emotionality found on prior releases — like “Yours Conditionally” — that can’t be fabricated. One could argue that it is replaced with a more mature and subdued sensibility, but the pure bliss of songs like “Fields of Blue” and “10 Minutes 10 Years” just isn’t anywhere to be found.
For example, though “Through the Mirror” is a strong song and features beautiful lyrics as well as delicious production, it lacks that “it factor” — what makes a song get stuck in your head and forces you to sing it in the shower. “Face Down in the Garden” sounds great, is exquisitely cohesive and employs incredibly poignant lyrics, but it isn’t immensely affecting, at least at a sonic level.
In a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) done to commemorate the album’s release, Moore delved further into the nuances of their decision to bring things to a close.
“I’ll admit that was what made the band so special initially. It gave our work and our lives meaning,” she wrote. “But we started to feel like we were the product as opposed to the music we made. We felt like we were on a treadmill of self-improvement, but not for improvement’s sake, for the sake of optimizing ‘the product’ i.e. ourselves.”
In the interview with The Fader, Moore also stated that it being less and less affordable to be a musician every year didn’t help either.
“We’ve watched the industry change a lot, and I think it has gotten significantly harder to exist. I don’t want to be melodramatic, but it does feel like the middle class of music is being eviscerated,” she said. “We’ve watched, personally, our revenue streams get cut exponentially every year until some revenue streams are totally eliminated.”
The shape of music has changed a lot in many senses over the 15 years that Tennis existed as we know them, and it is a testament to the duo’s love for their work that they were able to consistently change alongside it.
The sound of “Face Down in the Garden” is night and day from their earlier work and not in a bad way — these referenced heavy, human weights are reflected in the album’s maturity just as much as in the maturity of their decision to bow out rather than risk losing themselves. Though one could argue that they are overly critical of themselves or just jaded, the decision was clearly made with a lot of thought and, most importantly, was theirs to make.
What’s next for the duo isn’t something fans often look forward to, but there’s still potential for a different kind of excitement: one drawing from the two’s readiness for their new life.
“We feel complete — like we don’t have to milk Tennis forever for content and continue this cycle of burnout,” Moore wrote in the Reddit AMA. “Patrick and I are at the very beginning of figuring out what an authentic life means for us, now that we are disentangling who we are from how we make a living.”
Tennis will soon be embarking on their final tour, which will double as a farewell tour and support for “Face Down in the Garden.” Those interested can access tickets on Tennis’ website.
June Min is a 2024-2025 Assistant Arts & Entertainment Editor. He can be reached at junehm@uci.edu.