Tennis have announced details of a new album.
Titled ‘SWIMMER’, it’ll be released via their own Mutually Detrimental label on 14th February 2020.
It’s preceded by a new single – their first new music in almost three years, ‘Runner’, which you can stream below alongside an accompanying video. It’s directed by longtime collaborator Luca Venter and is inspired by by singer Alaina Moore’s love of “old musicals and all things Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire and Bob Fosse.”
So there you go.
“Runner is the first song we wrote for our fifth record,” says Moore. “It began as a guitar riff Patrick recorded while we were living off grid, anchored in a fisherman’s cove called San Juanico. The only instruments we had on board were an acoustic guitar and a drum sequencer, but the limitations seemed to work in our favor. Until that point we had no clear vision for our writing. The demo Patrick recorded that day outlined our future, the first contours of our next record.
“It took months to write a chorus that fit. I wanted to respond to Patrick’s ideas without altering them. I cycled through chord progressions and pages of lyrics. A year passed. The song seemed to actively resist coherence. My breakthrough came when I began to think of the song as a conversation between two songwriters, a series of questions and answers. It constituted a shift in our writing relationship from one that was solipsistic— my songs, which were distinct from Patrick’s— to one of collaboration and attunement. I often wonder if a truly equitable partnership exists anywhere between anyone, but this song feels like a testament to its possibility.”
