THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Produced and recorded by the husband-and-wife duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore in their Denver home studio, Face Down In The Garden will mark the final recordings from this incarnation of Tennis.
“On a cross-country drive at the end of tour, our van and trailer blew four tires in quick succession,” says Moore. “That particular stretch of highway was a tire graveyard. I counted the shredded remains of 12 tires from where we sat on the side of the road, swapping out our last spare. Our bad luck was heavily contrasted by the good night we’d just had in Houston. The highs and lows of touring are unnatural, disorienting. On the shoulder of I-40, I began writing the lyrics to 12 Blown Tires. It is a constellation of memories from the road, and of our marriage, two endeavors that are completely, hopelessly entangled.
When we recorded 12 Blown Tires a few months later, I had the sense of distilling the past 15 years into four minutes of music. It felt like the end of something, though I wasn’t sure what. Patrick and I spent most of our 20s and all of our 30s focused on Tennis. It has been the most joyous, bewildering, challenging, and humbling experience. After finishing Face Down In The Garden, it became clear that we had said everything we wanted to say and achieved everything we wanted to achieve with our band.
“This will be our last studio album, at least in this configuration as Tennis. We are ready to pursue other creative projects and to make space in our lives for new things. In that light, the upcoming tour feels more poignant, like a concluding thought. These two kids from Denver who only ever dreamed of playing a few house shows are very fulfilled. Perhaps we’ll see you on the road. As always, thank you.”
Face Down In The Garden marks the seventh studio album from Tennis as well as the followup to 2023’s critically acclaimed Pollen. Offsetting intuitive melodies with unusual arrangements, the new album sees the duo return with music that both feels familiar but also resists convention. Songs like the recently released At The Wedding and Weight of Desire — the latter joined by a video directed by frequent visual collaborators Blossom Liu and Danny Gray — highlight Tennis’s ever-expanding range as writers and producers, evolving beyond their girl-group roots into what is unquestionably their most fully realized effort to date.
“Over the years our sound has evolved into three distinct categories: Brill Building, synth-pop, and rock,” says Moore. “Face Down In The Garden occupies all of that space. Except for the help of some outside drumming, we worked and recorded alone as we have done for the last few albums. We wanted to write ourselves off the map by doing the unexpected thing, offsetting intuitive melodies with unusual arrangements, to make music that feels familiar but resists convention. Despite being rattled by a strange year, it is our most confident album. We are very excited for you to listen, preferably loud and on headphones.”
