“We knew right away it was our last record. Patrick didn’t want to do any records after Pollen, but we thought we needed to do this right and with respect for our fans,” says Alaina Moore, one-half of indie pop duo Tennis (along with husband Patrick Riley), who announced on April 11th, prior to the April 25th release of seventh studio LP Face Down in the Garden, that their new album and upcoming tour — which was announced this Valentine’s Day and will have them headlining their biggest date yet in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection on May 31st at Franklin Music Hall — would be their last. (Tennis followed up their final studio album with Neutral Poetry: First Recordings, Unreleased Demos 2009-2010, an EP of unreleased tracks from the earliest part of their career, which dropped earlier this month.)
The announcement came alongside the release of “12 Blown Tires,” the third and final single from the forthcoming album, which Alaina began writing when Tennis was touring their previous full-length, Pollen, in 2023. The song was inspired by a cross-country drive, after a particularly great gig in Houston, in which the band’s van and trailer blew four tires back-to-back on an exceptionally hazardous stretch of I-40. While stranded on the side of the road, Alaina noted remnants of an additional 8 blown tires, and began composing the lyrics to the song, which she would go on to characterize as giving her, “the sense of distilling the past 15 years into four minutes of music.”
We’ve actually known Tennis for almost half of their 15 years, last chatting with them in March of 2023 and first officially meeting in 2018, but we’ve been phans for quite a bit longer. My most recent phone chat with Alaina Moore came the week following Face Down in the Garden’s release and just shy of three weeks after the announcement of the group’s conclusion. However, her spirits are far more positive than would be suggested by the term “bittersweet.” “Everything that I’ve read from fans has been really sweet and supportive,” she says, before going on to excitedly tell me about her post-Tennis endeavors: “I’m writing a book right now. I’ve been working on it for a while. It’s something I’ve wanted to get into for a while.”
And while Alaina admits to me that she feels like she’s done everything she’s wanted to in the form of lyric writing, when she describes the process of composing the nine songs of Face Down in the Garden, it’s obvious that it was far from lackadaisical: “Knowing this is the last thing that we do, we wanted to end on an emotional note… I wanted to make sure my unconscious mind had much more to say than my rational mind. I was focusing on every song having an emotional core, to prioritize that over anything.” She tells me that this is a little different from how Tennis had approached some of their releases of recent years: “On previous albums, we had really focused on writing singles, not that they were totally vapid, but prioritizing singles put us on a different path, musically.”
However, their approach to Face Down in the Garden wasn’t exactly something new for Moore and Riley: “We returned to that mentality we had when we did Yours Conditionally.” She explains that the two of them went into the 2017 fourth LP with similarly open minds: “We thought that would be our last album, or swan song… We’d been doing this for a long time and didn’t really make any money, we lost money, so let’s just end on a positive note, writing for ourselves and who cares? But that kind of reinvigorated us.” The record, and 2020 follow-up Swimmer, wound up being their best performing yet, prior to a little SNAFU: “We had a song that almost creeped into the Top 40… We had this glimpse of maybe having commercial success, but then that all fell apart because of COVID.”
Although Tennis might not have achieved “commercial success” by certain standards (often experiencing, “Anxiety, tears, so many difficult moments wondering if we could survive,” Alaina confesses), they did find themselves headlining the 1,300-capacity Union Transfer (for the third time) in 2021 and the 2,500-capacity Fillmore in 2023, and Alaina says she’s, overall, very happy with the decade and a half of Tennis: “It’s been a crazy ride and I’m really grateful for it.” She also tells me that their current dates – some of which are in spaces with capacities quite north of the aforementioned venues – feel like the perfect way to go out: “Honestly, just being in these rooms is kind of the end goal, these are career highlights.” (She also notes that fans can expect to hear something from every record and all of the hits.)
In addition to the venues that Tennis’ career has afforded them the opportunity to play on their last go-round, Alaina tells me that there is one particular treasured memory from early in the band’s career that she regularly revisits: “I honestly do spend so much time thinking about highlights over the years… I often think of Patrick and I holding each other and swaying at Terminal 5 when we were opening for The Walkmen, one of our all-time favorite bands. I will never forget Patrick’s face; it was one of those full-circle moments.” Speaking of full-circle moments, the last time I spoke with the band, Alaina’s other-half told me that — to his surprise and despite the band’s relative success — Tennis still proudly and happily tours in a van, so I ask Alaina if, for their last jaunt, they finally upgraded to a bus, to which she replies, “We’re gonna keep it in the van. We’re gonna end the way we started… We’re almost just being stubborn at this point [laughs].”
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