April 11th: A couple of hours ago, Tennis announced that their upcoming album, Face Down in the Garden, would be their last.
Even before I started fotocopy, I knew I wanted to write about Tennis. It was 2023, and Pollen, their sixth album, had been released some months prior. I replayed it constantly, on the way to work and then at work, where I sat alone in a usually empty storefront, tempted by expensive jewelry and homeware that my salary could barely afford. I was waiting for things to happen that never would, so in the meantime, I wore uncomfortably heavy shoes, dressed in all black, long layers, and took incessantly long walks to the post office, stopping into the neighboring stores to touch even more expensive things, wanting to fill the permanent emptiness inside me. I remember the color of the light shining against the Charles and the trees of the blooming Garden as I walked back home, the weather turning cool, and the sky violet, and the lyrics etching themselves onto my memory:
Feel the Earth begin to shift / How could anything contradict our nature?
Unintentionally, Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley have soundtracked seminal moments in my twenties under their Tennis moniker. The news of their indefinite hiatus first hollowed me, but I also know what it’s like to feel endings in not only the bones in your body, but also the bones of your craft. The feeling is still and silent, and only retrospectively, shows itself as transparent as water. In my last semester of college, I blasted Yours Conditionally inside the printmaking studio late into the night as I worked on the final pieces of a cyanotype project that never evolved beyond practice rounds. My studio was never silent, but my head was, and my hands worked until my eyes were tired, and I’d fall asleep on the Blue line, in the same warmth of the color stained by chemical residue on my pants and hands. The warmth subsided as I made it to my apartment, newly renovated but slanted enough that our chairs would slide gently across rooms in ghostly movement. But the only ghosts in that apartment were my then-partner and I, trying to navigate away from an ending we were both too young to admit to. The final late nights when warmth joined us, I played Tennis.
As I search my memories to write this, I am reminded of the annoyingly human proclivity to layer pasts so meticulously and precisely until all that is formed is an impenetrable sticky block of paste. I had not forgotten, only buried, how playing Tennis in an empty white studio felt before finishing school and its aftermath, when I was stubbornly still in between someone who felt safe, and then the impending heartbreak that followed. Remembering it now, I see my patterns clearly, my devotion to conditionality.
When I moved out of the slanted apartment, began a nine-to-five, and found band-aids for my leftover ache, I kept Tennis with me. My life felt vast and raw, yet I was attracted to the fragmental pieces of their discography. On my way back from New York, watching a neon sunset, I played songs from their 2013 single, Small Sounds. Dimming Light was on repeat on that bus ride, as I felt the chorus take over my language centers: Is it even enough to know what you're looking for? / Is it ever enough to have what you're waiting for? Despite my newfound stability, I was on a fragile high, searching for new desires to spill onto my days. I went to New York on weekends to escape my surroundings, I laid in new beds, I painted in my bed instead of crying in it.
Swimmer, released in 2020, came a couple of weeks before the bars, stores, and parks I used to frequent emptied. I bought a bike from an old skinny and white-haired man to commute to work, and on my lonely rides, with barely any cars to accompany me, I listened to this album in full. The days got longer and my life smaller, so everything started to blend; the watercolors of lilac bushes I made during this time, the way the sun hit my plant-filled kitchen, the mewing of my roommate’s cat under my bed. When summer arrived, I got high and read books in one sitting, underneath a shade of leaves near the Divinity School. I thought about the language of everything: unsent texts, graffiti, Tennis lyrics. What did recognizing a biblical reference from my childhood mean when I was in conversation with some power above me wanting me to allow for more, but I wasn’t ready? I was very depressed (who wasn’t?) and secluded. I take this moment to retreat to the present: this period of my life was a void, and now I remember it as otherwise. I was so inside of myself, excavating within my self-directed bitterness until I was left fuzzy in a new light, like peach skin left against a rough patch of grass. I began again: I cut off all my hair, wrote every day, biked. When it was time to depart from that self, I departed, shaped into another form.
As the release date for Tennis’s last album looms, I think about growing up. Beyond physicalities, I think about the reformation of the spirit and mind. I peer over my past selves, secluded enough behind an evergreen hedge, and I love her dearly, yet I am removed. When the album came out, I decided to listen first to the birds singing through the blue break of the morning. When I listen to Tennis, all my past lives unravel, and I can hold them in my palm. A song plays:
We are only single moments / strung together and held dearly.
Apart from their latest release and the albums I linked in this piece, if you want more formative Tennis, I recommend their 2017 EP, We Can Die Happy, and their 2014 album Ritual on Repeat (my Tennis tattoo is from this one!)
Face Down in the Garden is out now, and it’s an extremely well-crafted and beautiful record. Give it a listen <3
This issue was particularly hard to write, and it feels like the first complete draft of something I may rewrite or expand on later. I hold my inspirations so closely to my heart, it’s sometimes hard to fully explain why they’re so instrumental to both my personal and creative development. I deeply admire artists who create on their terms, especially in our current culture of overconsumption. Alaina Moore’s writing for Tennis has inspired me countlessly, and I’m going to miss it, but I’m excited for whatever she and Patrick Riley have lined up for themselves.
I am still reading Orbital, but perhaps in the spirit of wandering back to the past, I checked out from the library Like Love by Maggie Nelson, which I’ve recommended before on here, and Mona by Pola Oloixarac. The latter is a book I could not finish when I first tried to read it, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Will let you know what I think about it this time!
Right now, I’m into talking like I'm in The Sopranos, making oatmeal (peanut butter, coconut flakes, chia seeds, and granola, yum), and not wanting to wear shoes.
Like always, thank you for reading —
a big hug and kiss,
Gabo