Tegan and Sara - Hey, I’m Just Like You

The Guardian 80

(Sire)

With Hey, I’m Just Like You, Canadian twins Tegan and Sara Quin have cultivated a fresh start. After morphing from indie-punk outcasts into purveyors of sugar-rush pop beloved of Taylor Swift on 2013’s excellent Heartthrob, they hit a wall on its follow-up, Love You to Death. A commercial flop, it felt like a box-ticking exercise, with the band’s spirit lost under the sheen.

On their ninth album – a companion piece to their memoir, High School – they look back to move forward, with 12 songs reworked from demos they originally wrote when they were teenagers. The result is a clear-headed amalgamation of their two eras, veering from stomping emo (opener Hold My Breath Until I Die; I’ll Be Back Someday’s Avril-isms) to sleek, synth-led pop (the pogoing You Go Away and I Don’t Mind).

Pitchfork 71

On their ninth album, the twins revisit their roots, re-recording demos they wrote as teenagers and polishing them into poignant synth-pop gems.

The Guardian 60

(Warner Records)
Reworked songs of teenage travails from the Quin twins, who go back to their youth in slick, pulsating pop

As tracklists go, you don’t get much more evocative than the one attached to Tegan and Sara’s ninth album, a series of furiously indignant, laughably melodramatic and stomach-churningly poignant missives from the standard-issue internal monologue of the unhappy teenager. It’s tempting to leave the likes of Hold My Breath Until I Die and Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie) as song titles alone, imagining the contents to fit your own heady nostalgia trip. But if you do decide to dive in, you’ll discover plenty more painfully perfect evocations of adolescent angst inside.

Related: Tegan and Sara: ‘People never talk about women and drug use positively’