Due out in October, Crybaby is set to be Tegan and Sara’s tenth studio album. Originally forming in Canada in the late ’90s, the duo has now stayed together for a quarter of a century. In a new interview with NME, the sister opened up about what keeps them chugging 25 years into their incredible career.
The first key to their sustained success, as they reveal, is their nomadic music style, “We’re not like every other band. Aesthetically and sonically, we’ve been allowed to move around because we moved from the beginning, so we’ve always been a bit of a nomadic band in that sense.”
Being able to explore various genres of music and play in the entire sandbox of the industry without being pigeonholed has offered Tegan and Sara a certain amount of freedom few artists ever get to see.
The duo’s latest single, “Yellow,” offers a glimpse into Tegan and Sara’s often abstract songwriting process, with Tegan explaining:
“When Sara sent me that song, I was like: ‘It’s so beautiful, it’s so slow and sad. And then I thought: ‘My God, this is so hooky – like, speed it the [removed] up, this is a fucking pop song.’ And Sara was like: ‘No, this is the way it is….’ Sara will let other people tinker with her… but I feel like she is very resistant to me.”
Every battle the sisters have had with each other while writing albums has only made them stronger, though, “I think that resistance and stubbornness in the both of us allows us to be quite solid. Like, if someone walked up to me now and said they didn’t like the sound of our new record, I’d tell them they’re wrong. I’d be like: ‘This is absolutely the direction we were meant to go in.’ I think with Sara and me, that butting of heads is what allows us to be so sure [of our music] once it comes out.”