15 years ago, Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley formed Tennis after returning from an eight-month sailing trip down the Eastern Seaboard. Flash forward to April, 2025. The now-married duo, who met as students at the University of Colorado, released their self-recorded and self-produced seventh and final album, Face Down in the Garden via their own Mutually Detrimental imprint. Today, Tennis have bestowed one last parting gift, Neutral Poetry: First Recordings, Unreleased Demos 2009-2010.

The new eight-song EP features unheard versions from Tennis’s ‘60s girl group-inspired debut, Cape Dory. Alongside demos of the title track, “Marathon,” “South Carolina,” “Baltimore,” and “Pigeon” are exclusive songs “Key Largo,” “April and It’s Still Snowing,” and “One Day This Will Be a Good Songgg.”

Since Cape Dory, Tennis have continually evolved into vibrant, lushly arranged and layered pop packed with plenty of flourishing synths and Moore’s golden voice. But upon completing Face Down in the Garden, Moore and Riley realized they’d said everything they wanted to say and achieve as a band. The entire journey together has been an emotional roller coaster, and despite the joy the and fulfillment Tennis has brought them, they are looking forward to new creative challenges.

Desire courses through Face Down in the Garden. “I feel the weight of desire lead me on,” the intuitive Moore sings on “Weight of Desire.” On “Sister,” she yearns to know her (presumable) sibling Alison more deeply but perhaps laments that a person can never fully know someone even if they’re as close as a family member.

Throughout their tenure, Tennis have illuminated both the broad aspects and intimate moments of love and the joys that make all the struggles worthwhile. The hypnotic, alluring “Through the Mirror” tearfully questions one partner’s confessed loneliness despite their devoted marriage. On the other hand, “At the Apartment” orbits around two lovers so locked in with each other that they nearly lose sense of the of the outside world, including the titular event on “At the Wedding,” a song that contemplates longevity, conclusions, and following one’s own path. “12 Blown Tires,” their final reflective bow preceding instrumental closer “In Love (Release the Doves),” recalls snapshots from their marriage and life on the road. “Seems like luck was all we had,” Moore sings, but in her heart of hearts, she surely knows that they had ever-developing talent and drive on their side, too.

Ultimately, desire has driven Tennis to chase their goals, confront and overcome their fears, and create a life Moore could never dream of. It has propelled them through any struggle they’ve experienced as partners in life or in a band. Even if they’ve landed at the terrifying edge of the unknown, it’s the same unknown – the same openness of possibility – that continues to inspire them.

Northern Transmissions spoke with Moore about working with a performance coach to prepare for their final tour, at what point putting out their final album started to feel real, her future creative goals, discovering her musical voice through Tennis, why now was the right time to release Neutral Poetry, and more.

Northern Transmissions: The album’s been out for a few days now. How are you feeling with finally getting it out there?

Alaina Moore: It feels great. It’s sort of anticlimactic to lead up to it and then it’s just streaming now. [Laughs] But it feels so nice to know that one of the final stages has begun, and we’re really ready to go on tour and have some these songs come to life live.

NT: Especially in the streaming age, does putting the album out feel a lot more climactic when a band gets ready to set out on tour? When you get to see your fans face to face and people react live, does that make it feel more real?

AM: Yeah, I need the physicality, either the physical product being in stores or being on tour and seeing fans personally. That’s what makes it real.

NT: With this final tour coming up, how are you feeling mentally and emotionally prepared? Are you entering these shows in a different mindset than in the past?

AM: Actually, I really am on a personal level. I’ve been working with a performance coach who’s kind of like a mental coach for athletes or performers. She works with people who are on Broadway. I’ve been working with her because I’ve been wanting to really maximize this experience for myself on tour. Sometimes shows are kind of crazy for me, and I get a bit disassociated. I really want to be present, especially since this is our last tour, our last album. It’s been amazing.

NT: What kinds of prompts does the coach give you to help accomplish this?

AM: In some senses, she’s just like a therapist and helps me work through a bunch of things. But more practically, we do visualizations and come up with tools. This is so much more common with athletes, and that’s actually what gave me the idea. Weirdly, my brother-in-law’s a pro soccer player. I’ve heard a lot about mental preparedness that these athletes do – he was in the Olympics and the World Cup – and I thought it was interesting that it’s not that normalized for performers at any capacity. I felt like I would benefit from it, and I’m really glad that I’m doing it. It’s been awesome.

NT: How mentally and emotionally prepared do you feel for Tennis’s farewell shows? Are you approaching them differently than your other shows? I saw Porridge Radio’s third last North American show in Seattle a few months ago, and there was a sense of levity, like knowing that the end was not only coming but also near allowed the band and audience to cherish every last moment. Are you feeling that?

AM: That’s what I want to be able to have, and that’s why I’m working with this performance coach. I expect there to be some measure of that, but I’m the last person that anyone would have expected to be onstage permanently for their career, and I’ve always felt like a fish out of water, so I really want there to be a levity. I want it to be fun. I want it to be a release, and I want to be very engaged with the crowd.

NT: You’ve said that stepping onstage and setting sail have both given you a transformative feeling that makes you a person you didn’t know you could be but want to be. Intentionally or not, do you think that’s a feeling you’ll always be chasing with whatever you work on next?

AM: I’ve learned that I usually need to push myself in the direction of this thing that I’m afraid of doing. It’s normally because it matters to me, and because the stakes are high, I’m afraid of doing it.

After this tour, we’re going to go on another sailing trip. Sailing is a really incredible experience. I’m usually scared shitless the entire time. I can’t swim. The ocean terrifies me. I don’t feel at home on the ocean. The ocean feels like a stranger with ever-changing moods that I don’t trust at all. Every time I do that, I’m definitely pushing myself. I can’t imagine a life where I’m not putting myself out there and I’m not taking a risk. I’m just ready for it to be more internal and less
performative.

For example, I feel like writing a memoir is a completely private act. It’s the part of being in the band that I’ve always liked the most which is making records. It’s really, really difficult, but that’s the part I’m always the most proud of and most driven to do. I’m excited to write and just put it out there, and I don’t have to go recreate live in front of people. I want to be able to create privately and not have to perform the creation publicly.

NT: So would you say you find greater fulfillment in the process of it all? Like you’re prefer to be in the studio?

AM: Absolutely. Don’t get me wrong, I am so proud of and grateful for our experiences of touring, and when we can’t tour a record, something feels very incomplete. In 2020, when our tour got cancelled for Swimmer, and that was the first time we couldn’t tour a record, it really felt like something was missing. And we almost felt like we couldn’t move on and write another record until we toured Swimmer. So that part has been very important to this process, but that’s definitely something I’m ready to move on from. I’m ready for the idea of being in a place and building some deeper roots and being around to help a friend move or go to a birthday. I will always have creative endeavours as the backdrop of that, but I’m ready to disentangle that from this life on the road.

NT: Romance, whether in the sense of love or adventure, has always been at the core of Tennis, including the band’s origin story. How have your notions of romance changed since forming Tennis?

AM: I never really thought I was a romantic person, but I guess I am because I have more or less been chasing Patrick around ever since I met him. Everything we do was his idea. This is not to say I’m a passive person, but he’s had these huge ambitions that were frankly just more exciting than mine. I had my own dreams, but they were a bit more conventional. I wanted to go to grad school. I wanted to be a lawyer. He wanted to sail around the world on a small boat. He wanted to start a band. He had all these dreams that seemed too out reach, but he just makes it happen. It’s very inspiring to watch him manifest with sheer will all of these goals, so I’ve been just along for the ride. I’m afraid of the ocean. I have performance anxiety onstage. None of these were my original ideas. But I’m just so happy to be living in Pat’s dream.

NT: With the conclusion of Tennis, are you also viewing it as a time for delving a bit more internally into your own practice, an opportunity for you to carve out and explore more of your own world?

AM: Absolutely. That’s a huge part of it. Tennis is completely shared. It is the shared creative expression of mine and Pat’s. We obviously have a lot in common, but we have a very slim overlap of our Venn diagram, and that’s where Tennis lives. I am really excited to enter a stage in life where I have autonomous creative projects. Obviously, he’s my team mate, my life partner; we’re always gonna be participating in each other’s work in some capacity. But I am ready to make something alone. I haven’t done that since we’ve been together. But in a lot of ways, having worked with him over the years has given me the confidence to do something on my own, and I hate saying that I kind of needed my husband to get me there, but I honestly would not have thought I was capable of half of what I’m capable of if I haven’t lived this life with him. Now I feel ready to do things on my own like write a book, or books. I’m just very ready for that.

NT: Also, support doesn’t always have to look like someone literally standing by your side. Just the confidence they give you or the skills or insights you gain from someone is something you carry into whatever you do by yourself.

AM: Mhmm.

NT: On “I Can Only Describe You,” you sing, “Making excuses looking back / I’m getting good at ignoring the past.” Has it hit you that this chapter in your life is closing yet?

AM: We’ve been acknowledging it with every individual milestone. When we shot our last music video, we said on set, “This is our last music video.” When we had our little album release party over the weekend, we said, “This is the last one we’ll have.” We’ve been acknowledging it every step of the way.

NT: Is that something you’ve had to consciously practice? I feel like sometimes people can get so busy that they don’t realize until a bit after the fact.

AM: I agree. In this instance, that hasn’t been a problem for us because we knew when we were making the record this would be the last album. If we hadn’t had this long runway to process it, I think it would have been a lot harder. We would have been caught up in the minutia and busy work of putting out an album and preparing for tour, and we would have been caught off guard later being like, “Oh my god, it’s over, and I missed it.” But that’s not the case, only because we have known in our hearts. We work very intuitively. It had been so clear from so long ago, so it’s been a lot easier to acknowledge this at every stage.

NT: I’m also wondering, Neutral Poetry – is there a reason you’re choosing to release it now? Is it to close the circle on Tennis and show “This is how it started, and this is how it ended?” To show that growth?

AM: That’s a perfect way of putting it. It was actually Patrick’s idea. We were feeling a bit nostalgic because this is the first thing he ever engineered, the first songs we ever wrote, and we were listening back to them kind of overcome with a sentimentality of, “I can’t believe how far this has come.” We would never have believed it at the time. But also, we feel like the first songs we wrote really holds up. I’m still so proud of them. On Neutral Poetry, there are some unreleased demos that never got finished. They’re clunky, and they’re malformed, and I find them very endearing. They’re not great songs, but I just liked to show our work. I like showing where we started, and you can see the potential in there even though it’s completely unrefined and we don’t really know what we’re doing yet. I love remembering who we were at that stage in life, and I especially love remembering what songwriting felt like to us back then. It felt significant to release those things almost simultaneously, just a couple weeks apart. I really wanted to just show our work of this whole project.

NT: What would you saying was the biggest lesson you learned through being in Tennis? What has being in the band for the last 15 years meant to you?

AM: I don’t know if I’ll be able to articulate what it’s meant for me for a while. I think I need some space to have perspective on that. But the biggest thing I’ve learned over the years of being in Tennis, I feel like in the early stages, our first few albums, I really struggled to know, “What does a song by Alaina sound like?” Our first record, we’re doing a one-to-one imitation of girl groups. That was our entry point to songwriting.

As we evolved, I kept asking myself, “What does a song by Alaina sound like?” I learned that that came through hundreds of thousands of tiny decisions. If all the little choices I made as the songs came together – even the choices I made to throw away a song, alter a song – through all of those little choices, it stated to emerge over time. It was like building something so slowly, brick by brick. I kept wanting some big revelation, like “That’s my voice. This is my point of view,” but it took a long time, a lot of writing, and many, many little choices until I started to understand, “This is Tennis. This is me. This is how I write. Lyrically, this is where my voice wants to live in a song,” and I just thought that point would never come. I’m so glad that it did, and I’m so proud to have gotten there, because I really did wonder if i would ever find it.

order Tickets, Face Down in the Garden, Neutral Poetry: First Recordings, Unreleased Demos 2009-2010 HERE