Tegan from Tegan and Sara talks new album Love You To Death: “This record feels different… we’re revitalised”

Three years ago, an amazing thing happened to Tegan and Sara. After garnering a supremely loyal fanbase for the best part of a decade across six albums, the Canadian sibling duo made a bid for the mainstream with 2013’s Heartthrob – and they were welcomed with open arms. “We counted our blessings every day that we were able to do it without alienating our audience too much,” Tegan told us when we phoned her up in L.A to talk about their much-anticipated follow up, Love You To Death.

And judging by the response to the songs they’ve put out from the record so far – Boyfriend, U-Turn, 100x and Stop Desire – this time they're casting the net even wider. “We’re completely overwhelmed by the reaction to the album so far,” Tegan said. “With our last record there was this tinge of ‘what’s going to happen? Are people are going to hate that we’ve made a pop record?’, so it was coloured a bit by our anxiety over that. This feels really different.”

The overwhelmingly positive response you had to Heartthrob doesn't happen with pop albums very often. How did you even begin to approach writing and recording Love You To Death?

It was a very delicate process. The Heartthrob record was a very laboured process but we definitely wanted – needed – to shift. We needed to close the chapter on the first decade of our career and revitalise it. We called it the botox era – there was a desire to liven things up. Looking back, I think that description sort of cheapens what we did. Ultimately we ended up revitalising our career, rather than playing it safe and giving our audience only what they’re accustomed to.

When starting Love You To Death, we looked at what did work, what didn’t and what was missing, as well as all usual ‘let’s make sure thematically we’re pushing ourselves’ stuff. The exciting thing about when we started this album is that we realised we’d had an enormous amount of growth in our careers and personal lives. We went in feeling pretty confident. We knew we wanted to push the envelope and draw on our favourite ‘80s and ‘90s bands. We managed to secure Greg Kurstin for the album again, and we decided to make the album just the three of us, similar to [2007’s] The Con album.

As you just mentioned, you’ve teamed up with Heartthrob producer Greg Kurstin again. Were you not tempted to chuck out Heartthrob pt. II and call it a day?  

One thing we took away from the Heartthrob record was that while the diehard fans eventually came around to it, one thing they said was missing which we agreed with was the vulnerability and edge of our previous records. I think with this album we’ve found that pop high point that we managed with Heatthrob but with some added edge to it. Matching those two things was hard.

Production-wise, for the most part the album is quite breezy and glossy, but lyrically there’s a lot going on…

“I think we really needed that for ourselves. We love pop music, and a lot of people just focus on the production, but what Sara and I love about pop is that you can write something very universally appealing that’s both easy to listen to but thematically has depth.

The album deals with all different kinds of love and relationships. Is it all based on personal experience or are you just excellent storytellers?

I think it’s all based in reality but there’s a storytelling element as well because Sara and I were both looking backwards at the last few years when writing the record. Like when we wrote The Con, I was in a really stressful and very anxious time in my life where we’d lost a couple of important people. Love You To Death is very similar in that sense; it looks at how you’ve behaved in relationships and how you’ve suffered but also the pain and anguish you’ve caused other people. Underneath that is also the questioning of loss – we lost two people that really mattered to us while working on this record. Ultimately, we're questioning how we treat ourselves.

When you put it like that, the album title makes a lot of sense...

It’s always hard to name the records because Sara and I always have different interpretations of the songs and we pull in different directions. At one point we were close to naming the record The Separation, though we were never 100% settled on it. It sounded like a movie title and a twin to The Con. But we thought about what separation really means and the idea of me detaching from Sara, my mother, life… Although Sara and I obviously aren’t married because we’re siblings, music in a way is like a marriage for us. We own property and a company together – we have a household and we’re great partners, but now we’re separated and creating our own lives. There’s a lyric on a song that didn’t make the album where Sara sings the line love you to death, and I just loved the idea of the similarity between that and til death do us part. It’s cheeky and quite dark.

So you recorded more songs? The album is 10 tracks long, which feels quite short…

You think? We felt that way too at first, and we were actually meant to record 12 songs with Greg but ended up doing 11. Weirdly enough it sounds completely different to the rest of the album, though I’m sure we’ll release it at some point. We just felt at this point that 10 is probably enough, especially when the traditional ‘start to finish’ record is starting to fade away. You get these albums that are like 17 songs long… to me that’s so self-indulgent!”

Is it fair to say you’ve referenced a lot of ‘90s sounds on Love You To Death?

We were both really fixated on the early ‘90s stuff when making the record with Greg - it’s funny because a lot of people are connecting it to ‘80s keyboard sounds. We were fixated on TLC and those ‘90s R&B-pop sounds. It’s interesting you described it as breezy before, because we definitely wanted this record to feel less dense and compressed than Heartthrob – less vocals and less tuning.

Is there a song on the album you’re particularly proud of over the others?

The song Dying To Know. It was the last song we did for the record and I feel like I really pushed us in a new direction. It’s a true collaboration between me and Sara and Greg did such a great job on the production. It’s a very different kind of pop and I think it pushes the boundary of what Tegan and Sara has been. It’s also packed with ‘90s references, which makes me love it even more.  

This is your eighth album; how many more Tegan and Sara records do you think you both have in you?

Who knows?! I think we’ve got better at figuring out what we’re doing these days so we don’t want to kill each other. When you’re younger you feel you have to say yes to everything, and if momentum starts to kick in you end up stretching yourself thin and end up exhausting yourself. That happened a bit with Heartthrob. We went toured with The Killers, The Black Keys, fun. and Katy Perry and it was thrilling, but we also felt disconnected from our audience a bit. With this record we want to bridge ourselves back to things that make us love what we do, and I think we’ve achieved it.

Tegan and Sara release Love You To Death on June 3.

Article image: Pamela Littky