What Life Was Like for a Married Indie Duo on Tour in 2012: Tennis Take Us Back With Photos of a ‘Naive’ Time

When Tennis announced they were embarking on their farewell tour after 15 years and seven albums, a longtime friend of the band reached out to them with a digital time capsule. Charlotte Zoller, who met the duo at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound in 2011 and accompanied them on tour the following year, was sitting on a trove of pictures she’d taken of the married indie-pop duo from February to March of 2012.

Beautifully framed, unrehearsed, slice-of-life, these photos show the band’s Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley on the cusp of catapulting their career to the next level, doing everything from playing The Tonight Show (back when Jay Leno was host) to catching Zs on a park bench. “We didn’t even notice she was taking any of these photos,” Moore tells Billboard over Zoom, sitting next Riley. “She’s very subtle.” The pics, which Tennis and Zoller are exclusively sharing with Billboard, offer an unvarnished look at what life was like for a smaller band back in 2012: a period when the indie music boom hadn’t fully cooled, music blogs reigned supreme, and streaming existed but hadn’t become ubiquitous.

Since then, breaking through – and keeping afloat – has become trickier for most musicians, especially mid-sized and smaller artists, which is part of the reason Tennis is hanging up its rackets, at least for now.

“I don’t want to complain about the music industry, because you could do that ad nauseam, but that is part of the equation here,” Riley says matter-of-factly, without bitterness. “Every year, our responsibilities grow and Spotify or whatever pays us less. There are so many things you can point to – costs on the road grow, too. Our workload increases and our payout decreases.”

A shifting music industry is only part of what’s motivating them to move on, however. As Tennis talks about the end of this chapter, there’s a palpable sense of accomplishment and pride in what they’ve done, too.

“More than anything, we felt very creatively fulfilled. We took Tennis as far as we could take it within the constraints of this project,” says Moore. “There’s only so far we could go as a married duo that makes indie surf pop, you know? Everything we do is self-produced. We don’t write with anyone else. We operate inside a vacuum. I think doing that for 15 years is as much as two people can create. We felt like it was fully realized.”

The band – which began the year Moore and Riley married – has defined not only their adult life, but their marriage; naturally, they’re also looking forward to putting “a bit more of a boundary between the two.” Post-Tennis, Moore is working on a memoir, with hopes of writing fiction after that. For his part, Riley aims to do “something that doesn’t deal with intellectual property” for a spell. “Clear the old noggin,” they laugh.

As Tennis embarks upon the second leg of its farewell tour (the new leg kicked off Aug. 18 in San Diego and runs through Sept. 4 in North America before hopping to London on Oct. 23), the band’s Moore and Riley take us on a trip through the past.