Tennis gets back in the game with new album, tour, and music video
Face Down In The Garden arrives April 25.
Screenshot: Tennis/YouTube
Husband-and-wife duo Tennis are back with their seventh studio album after what sounds like a biblically bad touring experience. “The inspiration for new work came while we were still on the road touring Pollen,” vocalist Alaina Moore said.
Pollen came out in 2023, and while the tour was so bad it sounds like it will take the band a bit more time to process, they still managed to make lemonade in the end. “We felt a clear pull to write new music, but ran up against a series of bizarre setbacks,” Moore explained of the album’s unmaterialized first iteration. “We blew tires and lost an engine. I developed a chronic illness. We took a doomed voyage that culminated in an attempted robbery at sea. Fragments of songs that first arrived like gifts from the universe later refused to be completed. Our days were awash in major and minor crises that dragged the album out endlessly.”
Some day, Tennis is going to release that record, and it’s going to be absolutely insane. For now, Moore is finding solace in the past. “Patrick (Riley, Moore’s husband and bandmate) and I felt out of sync with the world, as though we had been ejected from the flow of life. My response was to bury myself in my own memories,” she explained. “Those years weren’t easier or better, but I could make sense of them. In Face Down In The Garden, I trace the arc of my life through a series of vignettes: a first moment of connection, a conversation at a wedding, a night offshore, a tour diary.”
Tennis released the first of those vignettes, “Weight Of Desire,” along with an ’80s-inspired music video today. You can check that out—as well as the band’s newly announced North American tour dates—below:
MAY
16 – Las Vegas, NV – Swan Dive *
17 – Salt Lake City, UT – Metro Music Hall *
18 – Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Block Party #
