• If you know and love Tegan and Sara’s music, as I do, the exuberant, polished sound of Heartthrob will come as a shock, almost a deliberate provocation. What happened to those neurotic, self-deprecating indie rockers, the twins from Canada obsessively chronicling their crushes and heartbreaks? When did they become so confident and radio-friendly, so unapologetically mainstream? Are Tegan and Sara pop stars? Why would they even want to be?

Six albums in thirteen years, a passionately devoted international audience, some serious brushes with commercial success, an impressive catalogue of consistently wonderful songs, to my mind one of the most striking and underrated bodies of work in the past decade. But they finished their last tour feeling oddly dissatisfied. They weren’t kids anymore—they’d just turned thirty, and they wanted more. They felt restless, couldn’t understand why they weren’t reaching more people. So Tegan and Sara took a deep breath and a long look in the mirror, and popped into that nearby phone booth.And out came Heartthrob.