The horror: I was a teenage classic rock kid. I blame my parents. My dad is still adamant in his opinion that music got progressively worse after the ’70s and is now totally unsalvageable, and my mom’s favorite contemporary artists were of the Black Eyed Peas and Jennifer Lopez sort. Everyone at school listened to weed rap and conservative country. But you get the idea. With each passing decade I had less music from it that I was into, and while I don’t recall ever making any crazy generalizations about how all modern music sucked I certainly didn’t seek any of it out, so is that any different?

When I began to get a sudden passion for discovering new music I really felt like I was missing out on an entire era, but I still couldn’t find any comfortable entry point. On a forum I frequent I asked for any music recommendations and someone linked me to a song by a duo I had never heard of before. That song was “The Ocean” and that duo was Tegan and Sara. I was hooked. It was like lightning flashed, and there it all was. I never looked back, and no longer needed to try to look forward. I was naturally focused there now.

That began a long-term obsession with the Canadian sisters. I have fond memories of that fall/winter season I first discovered indie pop. Senior year of high school I’d come into my first period early because I had no friends and listen to Tegan and Sara on my cracked used iPod Nano that I didn’t even pay for. I’d be freezing my ass off in one of the coldest rooms in the building accompanied by the chilly high-pitched piano notes of “Alligator”. I’d remember the similarly snowy and adorable music video too. It’s still one of my favorites, as someone who usually tries to avoid watching music videos.

Sainthood had come out most recently and featured my beloved “The Ocean”, so we all know where I started. I worked my way backwards from there and eventually grabbed all their albums. So Jealous and The Con were also instant classics for me and my 8 gig iPod soon featured more songs by Tegan and Sara than any other artist. I’d put the songs on shuffle and listen to them endlessly while playing games on my DS and PSP. Those songs never got old. They still haven’t.

Though I started with Sainthood, if I’m gonna talk about Tegan and Sara as artists I have to begin where they did. Under Feet Like Ours dropped all the way back in 1999, which is hard to believe. Practically a bedroom indie folk album, this humble beginning still featured the duo’s easily recognizable bare and confessional lyrical style. But the girls were far from developed in songcraft as of yet, and the accompanying music was practically a filling background for their stories. It’s one of the beautiful and universal things about folk as a style, but their aimless strumming could never convince of their intentions as well as their indelible sense of melody that would soon follow and cement them as the indie pop masters of their generation.

This Business of Art released only a year later and showed a surprisingly large improvement in passion and songwriting, perhaps inspired by record label interest and other positive reception. Though they’ve always been seen as a cornerstone of indie music, there’s no question that TBoA is their definitive statement as part of a counterculture. While the acoustic base of Under Feet Like Ours is still very audible, its plainness is done away with embellishments of electric guitar and the odd choice of rather blunt synthesizer sounds. On paper this dank and blotchy synthesizer tone would clash with an ordinarily thin acoustic guitar strum, but instead it adds a dark, uncleanly atmosphere to the album that suits the isolation and post-relationship cynicism that readily comes forth in the lyrics. Tegan Quin’s vocals are particularly punkish on this album, delivering a hoarse near-growl on the opener “The First” as well as “Freedom”. The appropriately named latter song features an intro that demonstrates the girls’ songwriting cleverness: a sole harmonica that immediately conjures images of lost, train-hopping vagabonds.

Several songs from the debut album were reworked and improved for this more serious effort and the rough nature of the performances on This Business of Art have only grown on me over time. I used to consider it Tegan and Sara’s most abrasive album and I guess I still do, but now it’s as accessible to me as any other and I consider it one of their most underrated. As far as I’m concerned their full skill is nearly already on display here. Highlights for me include “The First” with its fury and that aforementioned synthesizer very present, “All You Got” with Sara Quin’s passionate begging in the chorus, and “Superstar”, an odd percussion-driven song that could work on the dancefloor despite it being one of their most unusual songs.

Now having found their muse, the girls released a nearly as quick follow-up: 2002’s If It Was You. By all intents and purposes this was the album that would mark the start of Tegan and Sara’s most definitive era and recognized sound. Though far from out of things to say, these girls were now paying increasing attention to how exactly they said it. The frustrated and rebellious teenagers have come more to terms with themselves entering their 20s, as adults generally do, and the desire to front and be heard has melted away and revealed that pop base that really just wanted to connect with anyone at all.

Tegan and Sara’s much more conscious pop manifesto announces itself immediately with the marching beat of “Time Running”, a punchy rock number that could be called their first confident song. When the chorus hits the twins more willingly cooperative nature has even turned on themselves. Sara harmonizes perfectly on cue with Tegan, whereas on earlier albums they tended to keep their personalities and vocals separate from each other. This is no longer Tegan Quin and Sara Quin, sisters who happen to share the same record with each other, but the partnership act of Tegan and Sara the fans recognize, love, and never subconsciously divide.

If It Was You still might be Tegan and Sara’s most rockin’ album. It’s much less lonesome than This Business of Art, or even its two successor albums, and this good mood manifests itself in the bopping electric guitar riffs that dominate nearly every track and makes the previously mentioned harmonies that much brighter. Tegan and Sara didn’t change their songwriting toolbox as much as they began to build slightly different things. If It Was You is rarely anyone’s favorite Tegan and Sara album and I often wonder why, as I would imagine its high energy would make it the most contagious. Perhaps I shouldn’t be talking as it’s not my favorite either, but that opening track, “Monday Monday Monday”, “Underwater”, “I Hear Noises”, and “Want to be Bad” are enough classics for me to call this a marked improvement in quality.

2004’s So Jealous is overall similar in sound. Tegan and Sara seem to realize they’ve hit a goldmine in their new sound and deliver 14 tracks in what’s their longest album by a significant margin. The dominance of the electric guitar has been replaced again with the acoustic, but given the same pop charisma of If It Was You it would be easy not to notice at first. The acoustic focus molds a particularly soft but even more melodic album than before, making So Jealous the Tegan and Sara album I love to put on at night. There’s something very contemporary about how smooth the sound is on So Jealous, and it conjures up images of nighttime city squares lit up by lights and the many others who can’t find time to sleep. I would call this Tegan and Sara’s most beautiful album, and although it’s bloated by their standards the taste of it is so clean that it glides by in a refreshing wave that’s never enough. So Jealous is the modest sort of pop album that gives and gives while asking for very little in return from the listener. It’s a gorgeous easy listen and my second favorite from these girls. Highlights are many, but specifically the enthusiastic “Take Me Anywhere” that embodies these simple songs extending their hands to me personally, the warm fuzz of “I Bet It Stung”, and the yet again assuring “Downtown”.

Tegan and Sara’s I Take the Blame EP dropped in 2007 and features two unique songs that are some of their odder sounds. Keyboards regularly complemented Tegan and Sara’s guitar pop in the background – it’s one of their subtler trademarks – but here they’re without the foreground. “One Second” and “I’ll Take the Blame” sound particularly bare and dryly drone on more than hook. Their appeal is that of a novelty sort, but at least the end result is that they feel more like weak songs than underdeveloped songs. Some effort is there.

The Con hit that same year. I’m not sure where to begin with The Con as it’s almost unanimously considered to be Tegan and Sara’s greatest album. As a member of the fanbase I know firsthand how readily any will scoff at you for putting any album before The Con. The Con is in a sense Tegan and Sara returning to their counterculture indie roots with the songwriting skill they’ve developed while practicing in purer pop. I suppose that explains it. An artist’s most popular album is generally the one that balances unique sonic ideas (“abrasion”) with accessible hooks (“understanding”). Both grab the listener’s attention for different reasons and unite the broad tastes of a potentially large fanbase. Regardless, I should say now that I think The Con is relatively overrated, but only in the context of the rest of their discography. If it wasn’t for the scoffing I wouldn’t think anything of it.

To put it in simpler terms, The Con has Tegan and Sara’s greatest variety of sounds on one album but isn’t the peak of those sounds manifesting into strong hooks. This admittedly diverse album does have some common ground in that it divides the folk and rock songs of So Jealous even further, capitalizing on one or the other rather than attempting to marry them. Sara Quin’s acoustic songs are noticeably bizarre and borderline psychedelic, most obvious on the sitar-like strumming of “Knife Going In”. But despite all this ambition, how many of these songs do I (or you) play outside of the album frequently compared to the others? Not that many, but for me those are “The Con” with its massive wall of sound that helped break me into the group every bit as much as “The Ocean”, the tap-dancing piano of “Back in Your Head” (the first big radio hit), the intriguing rotating sound of “Are You Ten Years Ago”, the toxic “Like O, Like H”, and “Call It Off”, maybe the duo’s finest success of folk pop.

Becoming critical darlings for the first time wasn’t enough to slow down these girls on a roll, and Sainthood came out a mere two years after like clockwork. Sainthood proved to be the biggest shift in sound between albums yet, with Tegan and Sara taking tips from other popular synth-driven indie rock of the time. The scratchy keyboards command the openers “Arrow” and “Don’t Rush”, but the following song “Hell” and later “Northshore” prove with a punk bluntness that Tegan and Sara still “love to rock and roll”. Though not as strange as The Con – hell, it’s unarguably a commercial turn – Sainthood contains just as much diversity as its predecessor. Many fans loathed this blatant change and labeled Sainthood a sellout album (which would look relatively silly with the next album), but it’d be absurd to deny Tegan and Sara ever weren’t a pop band. Even on the debut album you could tell that deep down it was their natural instinct, and if anything coming completely to terms with this instinct on Sainthood was their most honest move yet after spending the majority of their years making their sound increasingly accessible.

Sainthood is the awakening and full release of Tegan and Sara’s greatest skill of pop songwriting and clever hooks, and the death of indie as a counterculture movement as it was reborn (or strangled, depending on who you ask) into the standard voice of socially acceptable middle class youths made Tegan and Sara one of the rare artists to benefit from that. The girls themselves bask in this new freedom: “Time Running” was their first confident song, and now we have their first confident album as the girls distance themselves from their guilty and bitter heartbreak, instead realizing “something’s so sick about this, their misery’s so addictive” and that instead “they might be something someday”. That day was the today of yesterday: Sainthood was their highest charting album yet, and rightfully so.

The loud, fresh pop joy on display here lights me up every time I play Sainthood. Pound-for-pound, these aren’t just their best hooks by way of writing, they’re their best by performance. They’re so happy they’ve made it here. Aren’t you happy for them? There’s a more homogeneous sound here than on previous albums. Now that the girls are writing songs together, neither can self-indulge too much. While this hurts the strength of their confessional lyrics it aids the cohesiveness of the album and you never go from a relatively harsh acoustic Sara song to an upbeat rockier Tegan song.

There’s a bit of a middle weak spot after “Hell” to “Alligator”, but Sainthood starts and ends strong with an overall consistently high success rate. The soaring, airy jangles of “The Ocean” captivate me just as much as when I first heard them and the song remains my favorite by Tegan and Sara period, but the rough “Arrow”, the mechanical vocals of “Don’t Rush” (I especially love the way Tegan sings during the bridge), “Alligator” as mentioned in one of the first paragraphs, those rockin’ tunes “Hell” and “Northshore”, and the opposedly mellow “Paperback Head” and “Sentimental Tune” remain among my many highlights on this stellar album. That album that’s again, Tegan and Sara’s finest 40 minutes.

Tegan and Sara’s longest break between albums yet could still never be enough to prepare fans for when Heartthrob’s first single, Closer, dropped. No one ever would’ve guessed it, but much like independent music itself did, the indie twin superstars went entirely full circle and released an album of chart-aimed electropop. I still remember the cries back in 2012, because many of them were mine. If Sainthood was Tegan and Sara’s sell-out album, then what the hell could you possibly call this? When I first got the news I wasn’t that upset, because I love a lot of modern pop music. The only thing that mattered was whether Tegan and Sara could do it well or not. Closer was mediocre, but it was only their first attempt.

When I first heard Heartthrob I masked my disappointment by justifying this hugely commercial move in a review on RateYourMusic. Calling anything a “sell-out” is certainly presumptuous, and it certainly ignores the idea that the artist may simply be fans of the popular music they’ve heard and want to try their own for fun. And a passion eventually leads to an understanding, and understanding leads to self-consciousness which can lead to the highest point of quality and/or innovation. But I digress. I digress because this isn’t what happened, and it wasn’t even the direction took. Tegan and Sara outright admitted in interviews that they were only interested in selling more albums as opposed to a more modest stability.

Such basic inspiration leads to basic music. I am a fan of many modern pop acts. There is nothing particularly good about Tegan and Sara’s attempt at this style. Sainthood was commercial, but it was still clearly working out of that box of tools they had been using their entire career. Heartthrob is that new toolbox, and Tegan and Sara’s handling of what’s inside is not clumsy and amusing, but simply rudimentary and pragmatic. Before Tegan and Sara’s cute hooks could disguise their songwriting idiosyncrasies, but there is nothing hiding behind Heartthrob’s wave of loud transparent synthesizers other than more of the same. Heartthrob is not a bad pop album, it is an ordinary one. But coming from an experienced group like Tegan and Sara, it means the same thing.

But who were Tegan and Sara before, anyway? A lot of people still don’t understand, which is what prompted me to write all of this. Just mention Tegan and Sara to one of their many detractors. You’ll most likely get a combination of “lesbian gimmick”, “annoying voices”, and/or “bitches”. It’s very sad that such prejudices are still common, that many people won’t attempt to meet musicians, very real people, on their own personal ground – let alone their music.

Let’s talk about that music instead of their sexuality for once, because I guarantee it’s far more interesting a topic. More than anything, the quality that distinguishes Tegan and Sara is their voice. Yes, that’s singular because I’m not talking about the sound of their vocals. Though Tegan and Sara typically write about heartbreak they have a unique perspective on it I’ve not seen captured by any other artist.

Tegan and Sara’s stories and perspective of love and relationships are infantile and embarrassingly skittish. There’s something especially honest about this, as most romance lyrics are viewed from the perspective of the writer, who is naturally inclined to see themselves as the greater victim in the relationship. However, Tegan and Sara’s lyrics, despite also being written in first-person, are harshly self-critical as if they were dictated from the perspective of the opposite partner. Someone broken up with would view their bitterness towards the other as justified, while the receiver would see that person as childish.

Tegan and Sara play with this and reveal the true embarrassing side of post-relationship frustration many of us try to ignore through self-manipulating romanticizations and forget about afterwards so we can repeat the same mistakes and gorges of beautiful self-pity. Pay close attention to their deliberate and practically patented vocabulary all throughout their discography: “Thousands of miles, I cry like a baby”, “No hissy-fits, mind my manners”, “I just want to be bad”, “Now I’m all messed up”. Love is primal. Primal is childhood. Childhood is virginity. Virginity is pure. Love is childlike. This beautiful love and this disgusting heartache are pure. Tegan and Sara remind us of what we want to forget, but need to remember more than anything. Their lyrics are both anti-romantic and the most romantic of all.

This lyrical style matches the duality of their voices perfectly. Sara Quin wrote most of the above examples of lyrics, and her squeaky higher-pitched tone paints her as the immature younger sister to Tegan Quin’s more allegedly serious introspection where she’s generally trying to mask the emotions Sara is overly upfront about. This foil isn’t always consistent and the sisters often swap roles in that equation, but the indirect lyrical beg-and-answer is a consistent part of their sound, such as “Proud” seemingly being written in answer to “Freedom”. Tegan Quin is the maturity we want to achieve, but Sara Quin is what we actually are when we strip that act away. It’s two sides of the same coin, or perhaps the message is that they’ve both been sharing the same side the entire time.

It’s one thing to have such a way with words, but to have a way with hooks as well is something few artists can claim. I largely view Tegan and Sara’s sound as an extension of 80s twee pop. Their sounds are at once light but chaotically put together, as if they’re pulling out of a “pop grab bag”. The looseness and freedom of many of their notes, such as the simple lone piano riff of “Back in Your Head”, are as equally childish as their lyrics, but infinitely more delightful and an appropriate dynamic to their frequent pouting. Bitter pop doesn’t taste too well when handed out in the doses Tegan and Sara gives, and so they lighten it with their bright tunes, as if to assure “however ridiculous you feel, it’s perfectly okay”.

The intelligence with which Tegan and Sara craft their lyrics and songs is not immediately palpable, as is the case with any smart pop, but personality has an even greater survival rate than hooks, and given enough time for their initial prejudices to fade there is little doubt in my mind that Tegan and Sara will be seen as one of the greatest indie acts of their era, on the same level of artists such as Arcade Fire, Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens, and many other acclaimed contemporaries.

Perhaps the worst thing about Heartthrob is that it worked as planned. It charted well with the mainstream audience, and in its era of release the former hip indie kids have now become “poptimists”. I don’t think I need to remind anyone of the “Call Me Maybe” phenomenon, one of the first pop singles championed by “normals” and “indies” alike (because there’s no longer much difference). They’re right in that there’s a lot of great modern pop music, but their lack of effort in finding what that actually is doesn’t strike me as a genuine appreciation. The remaining fanbase is practically religious at this point and I’ve seen many others attempt the same obvious apologeticism that I originally did. But they can do what they will, it doesn’t really matter.

Yet, like one of the broken-hearted teenage girls depicted in the mock teen fashion magazine shipped with pre-orders of Heartthrob, I tore down all my monuments of love for my former idols and my slowing Tegan and Sara obsession came to its dying halt. Time heals all wounds, however, and as of writing this I’ve recently returned to my old favorite albums out of curiosity and realized that those older Tegan and Sara albums never left me. Tegan and Sara are alive right now, going places I’m not interested in, but those albums are static and still jogging in place. The memories I have associated with those albums are those of Tegan and Sara as personal friends. The same friends that hung out with me when no one would at school, or helped numb my mind for a bit when I came home after to unwind with some videogames. The same friends that extended their hands towards me in the form of the greatest indie pop hooks of the 21st century. Tegan and Sara were always trendy, but I never saw them as contemporaries of any genre. They were something outside of indie music. Something just for me. They still are, in a different time and place that I don’t mind returning to, if only for their music.

Album Ranking: Sainthood > So Jealous > If It Was You > The Con > This Business of Art > Heartthrob > Under Feet Like Ours

Top 5 Songs: The Ocean, The Con, Take Me Anywhere, Alligator, Don’t Rush