Tegan and Sara - Love You to Death

The Guardian 80

Continuing their skilful transition from the indie world to the mainstream, the Canadian twin-sister duo prove their pop chops on a brilliantly concise new album

The path from earnest indie singer-songwriter to glossy, electronic mainstream pop star is rarely smooth. The artist who decides to take it usually finds it fraught with obstacles. There’s the risk of alienating your old audience in search of a new one that may ever materialise, the accusations of selling out or capitulation to record company pressure, and the snarky suggestions that something craven and desperate must be afoot, the latter fuelled by the longstanding belief that the world of the indie singer-songwriter is a righteous and noble one, packed with free-thinking integrity, and mainstream pop is living proof of Hunter S Thompson’s line about the music industry being “a cruel and shallow money trench … where thieves and pimps run free”.

Related: Tegan and Sara: 'We wanted to explore a different side of ourselves'

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By Sainthood, the pair’s sixth LP that was released in 2009, it was clear that a breakaway was on the cards. The whole album felt like a precursor to The Big Tegan and Sara Pop Moment; they continued to tug ferociously on the ‘indie rock’ leash, but sprinkled the record with nods to their back catalogue that, in retrospect, feel like a knowing wink to the fans that were with them from day one. It shouldn’t really have come as any surprise that, on 2013’s Heartthrob, Walla had been dispensed with in favour of chart-pop guru Greg Kurstin, but the voracious appetite with which Tegan & Sara tore through ten bona fide pop gems actually bordered on disarming. You realised, in retrospect, that they’d been building towards out-and-out pop catchiness - they just hadn’t had the environment and resources afforded to them before.

At that point, Tegan & Sara felt like the world’s most brilliant pop group. They had everything; melodies and hooks were in bountiful supply, their lyrics struck a delicate balance between insight and abandon, and their sound was so polished you could see your face in it. With Love You to Death, they’ve completely doubled down on that. Again, Kurstin mans the boards, and again, the twins give themselves over entirely to razor-sharp, super-clean, chart-courting pop music. This album is less than 32 minutes long, and for a reason; there is a clinical economy to the way that Tegan and Sara write nowadays. Opener 'That Girl' is an exercise in lyrical brevity, over an electronic beat that pulsates and yet feels cleverly restrained. Instrumentally, minimalism kind of feels like the name of the game here. It really is as if the duo and Kurstin raked over Heartthrob with forensic attention to detail, stripping away anything that wasn’t deemed entirely necessary. ‘Stop Desire’ carries off the slow-burning verse to massive chorus manoeuvre with fabulous vigour and fizz, and ‘U-Turn’ provides compelling evidence of experimentation on what is otherwise a sharply focused LP; the groove’s tight, and the vocals over it are playful, another knowing wink on an album full of them.

And that, in itself, is a departure; Tegan and Sara used to be the sort of duo who were very much given to shrouding their lyrical meaning in metaphor. They’ve always packed an emotional punch, and there’s actually something about the sound of both Heartthrob and Love You to Death that suggests that particular facet might’ve automatically fallen by the wayside; perhaps there’s an ingrained belief that pop music packaged this attractively shouldn’t need to carry deeper meaning. As was the case last time out, though, there’s genuine emotional exploration here, particularly on the directly confessional ‘100x’, which has them turn meekly, but honestly, on each other. ‘Dying to Know’, too, becomes just that little bit more unsettling with every loop through the album; after all, fixation and infatuation are no joke in the digital age, and here we have a band who grasp the nuances of the situation.

It would be dishonest and wrong of me to suggest that I possess anything more than a cursory knowledge of the pop charts, but here’s one little thing that strikes me; when I was a kid, you never saw the same artist have two or even three separate tracks in the top five. Obviously, the fact that the likes of Justin Bieber, Drake and Rihanna have been able to pull that off this year is down to the quirks of the download age, and yet Love You to Death is such a brilliantly accomplished, gorgeously crafted pop record that it actually sounds like the sort of album that should be exclusively inhabiting the top ten, whether it’s here, Canada or Timbuktu. Everything’s slick, shiny and synth-driven, and you wonder what took Tegan and Sara so long; repeat listens reveal a couple of songwriters utterly at ease with themselves, especially when you delve into ‘Boyfriend’s fabulously casual inversion of society’s take on gender and sexuality.

At points, it’s so sharp as to be borderline surgical, and that’s where my anxiety for the band’s future kicks in; at points here, it feels like the emotional content is a bit of a bare-minimum job, compared to the broad confessions of old, and there’s points where Love You to Death sounds clean to the point of being sterile. But those concerns are for next time. For now, Tegan and Sara have reached the end of a thorny, awkward path to pop perfection. Those years of uncertainty have only sweetened the realisation.

The Guardian 80

(Warner Bros)

After 15 years in the outer reaches of the indie mainstream, the Canadian sisters Tegan and Sara Quin dived headlong into pure pop on 2013’s excellent Heartthrob. Now they have reunited with the producer Greg Kurstin (Sia, Kylie), Love You To Death is poppier still, each song buffeted by fizzing synths, pin-sharp drumbeats and chant-along, glitter-bomb choruses. While their musical palette has shifted, their lyrical detail remains razor-sharp – dissecting the complexities of modern relationships on Boyfriend and their own fractured sisterhood on the lovely 100x (“It was cruel of me to do what I did to you,” sings Sara). At times, the high-definition production sheen feels smothering, but overall this is a multilayered, emotionally engaging pop confection.

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In 2013, Tegan and Sara released their seventh album Heartthrob and immediately shot to a new level of fame. After a slow build over nearly 15 years, in which they steadily massed a fervent hardcore fanbase as a folk-inflected singer/songwriter duo, they metamorphosed in a blink into a massive pop group: instead of dual acoustic guitars and unadorned, harmonic vocals, they teamed up with Top 40 producer Greg Kurstin and adopted an ultra-glossy, near-blinding synth-pop sound. There's a razor-fine line between populist and derivative, and theirs was a calculated risk that paid off—not only was the record critically and commercially successful, it contained some of Tegan and Sara's best songwriting work to date.

After such an impressive and self-imposed breakaway, it's a bit of a shame that their new album, Love You to Death, feels like a focused retread of its predecessor. It's not a bad record—it's well-crafted, with some peaks equal to Heartthrob—but it lacks that intangible magic that so effortlessly bridged the first phase of their career to this new one. It might be unfair to ask them to recapture that moment, when they so recently were able to pull off the double accomplishment of becoming a new band while keeping their longtime fans, but between the bouncy synth hooks and sleek pop production (the band reconnected with Kurstin), you can feel some of the excitement draining away.

Their creative DNA has stayed more or less the same since they first began writing music, no matter the genre trappings around them. At their best, they boil down love songs to their purest, aching essence, capturing complicated emotions in economical, less-is-more lyrical strokes. “You kiss me like your boyfriend,” they coo on the album's lead single, “Boyfriend”—a moment of unrequited affection that sears through the buoyant synths and strike at your heart without halting the pace of the party. It's rare to find complex, personal songs about love and relationships matter-of-factly sung from a queer perspective, and in that respect alone Tegan and Sara remain a crucial voice in the pop landscape.

Elsewhere on the album, things a just a little less distinct; album cuts like “Faint of Heart” and “Stop Desire” are sturdy, but rely on a certain generic, contemporary-pop sound that could belong to anyone. Another highlight, “100X,” again shows how affecting they can be when they bend the tools of Big Pop to their personal ends. It's another tale of a relationship gone sour, this time with the narrator taking responsibility for the breakdown: “You were someone I loved/Then you were no one at all/It was cruel of me to do what I did to you,” they sing, the words placed simply around a sparse piano melody and some softly glowing synths. There's a straightforward emotional maturity in the moment that has always distinguished their best work. The minimal instrumentation serves double duty as both stark moment of contemplation and mid-album comedown.

Although songs like the Vince Clarke-indebted “BWU” begin to quicken the album’s pulse in the second half, it's not until the second-to-last track that Love You To Death reaches its bombastic peak, when “U-Turn”'s wet, squelching keyboards punch through the record's firmament and blast off into the stratosphere. It sounds like the Song of the Summer 1986, all pool parties, tiki torches and BBQs. It's proof that even though they might not capture lightning in a bottle twice, Tegan and Sara are still pushing hard to beat their own expectations, even this far into their career.