Tennis Announce Indefinite Hiatus, Release Final Single
Photo by Darren Vargas
This morning, Tennis—the duo of spouses Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley—have announced that, after 15 years, the band will go on an indefinite hiatus. They have a new album, Face Down In the Garden, set to arrive April 25, and will follow it with Neutral Poetry: First Recordings, Unreleased Demos 2009-2010, an EP of previously unreleased material from Tennis’ beginnings. Once those two releases are out, Moore and Riley will embark on one final tour across North America. Along with the announcement, Tennis have unveiled a new single, “12 Blown Tires.”
Moore shared this statement about the band’s ending:
“Face Down In the Garden is our seventh studio album. The inspiration for new work came while we were still on the road touring Pollen [in 2023]. We felt a clear pull to write new music, but ran up against a series of bizarre setbacks. 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.
“Patrick 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. 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.