Tegan and Sara, Hey I’m Just Like You review: Teenage tapes are revisited on a punchy but tender album

For their ninth album, the Canadian duo have re-recorded songs written when they were just ‘dirtbags’ in high school, stoned on acid and deep in the closet

Tegan and Sara’s last album, 2016’s ‘Love You To Death’, was a big, bold stadium-pop record; this one is less polished, but just as punchy (Artwork)

Lorde’s 2017 album Melodrama is one of the most painfully precise evocations of teenagehood around. Written when the New Zealand singer was 19, it is the sound of someone still in the heady mess of it all. But there’s something just as poignant about revisiting the forest fire of adolescence – a time when you feel at once invisible and invincible – from a safe distance. Which is exactly what Tegan and Sara have done.

For their ninth album, Hey I’m Just Like You, the Canadian duo have re-recorded songs they put on cassette tapes when they were still in high school – tapes that sat abandoned for two decades, only to be unearthed when the duo came to write their new book, High School. They weren’t yet the queer icons they are today – in fact, they were “dirtbags”, says Sara Quin in the album’s press notes, “stoned on acid, sneaking out, skipping school, lying to our parents”. They were closeted, too, isolated by their own repressed sexuality, and several tracks on the record – the synth-poppy “I Don’t Owe You Anything” and the spiky, guitar-laden “I Know I’m Not The Only One” – are about furtive relationships with girls.

Tegan and Sara’s last album, 2016’s Love You To Death, was a bold stadium-pop record; this one is less polished, but just as punchy. The twins grew up on a diet of Nineties grunge and west coast punk, and though the new songs are reimagined – the instrumentations bigger and plusher than their teen tape efforts – they still pay homage to their early influences. “Don’t Believe The Things They Tell You They Lie” is as furiously dramatic as its title suggests, all bashed-out drum fills and Rancid guitars, and “I’ll Be Back Someday” is fuzzy and scrungy, with a riff that sounds like Hoku’s “Perfect Day”. Meanwhile, “We Don’t Have Fun When We’re Together Anymore”, a song about growing so far apart from your friends that you begin to resent them, is fidgety and hyperactive.

They are more restrained elsewhere. On “Hello I’m Right Here”, written for a high school muse who rejected Sara with the crushing words, “I don’t feel that way about girls”, gloomy piano is slowly joined by plush, graceful strings. “I’m young but it’s hard to believe that someday I will never see you again,” she sings, “and you might not believe but you’ve changed me so much.”

Most people read their teenage diary and cringe. With Hey I’m Just Like You, Tegan and Sara have painstakingly, tenderly, written theirs out again.