Tegan and Sara have dropped new single “Fucking Up With Matters.” The track from their upcoming 10th studio album is their first new music released on the Mom+Pop label.
Co-produced by John Congleton, the song addresses the “turbulence” the twin sibling musicians have gone through and grown from alongside the worldwide challenges of the last couple of years, per a statement. Despite the heavier themes inspired by trying times, the song is an ebullient power-pop jam, which features the duo’s signature unison singing and catchy refrains.
“You’re like a tattoo, something I can’t undo,” they sing, followed by punked-up lyrics that list the ways in which they are “fucking up what matters”: “I’m not trying to destroy us, I just hate what we’ve become,” “I treat you like a credit card I can’t afford/I drain you like a bank account until there’s nothing more,” and “I treat you like a cigarette, such a bad habit/Avoid you like alcohol, I can’t really stand it.”
The accompanying Tony Wolski-directed video features the musicians as well as Railey and Seazynn Gilliland, who star in the upcoming Amazon Freevee High School series based on Tegan and Sara’s memoir of the same name. Executive-produced by Tegan and Sara, the show is currently in production in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The humorous clip opens on the duo brainstorming ideas for a video with director “Kyle,” who pitches concepts they’ve already done. Instead, they decide to make a cute video about how to make a music video.
Tegan Quin said the song “felt like an ode to the moment in your life when you realize that you have most, if not all of the things you wanted and you start to think about what would happen if you just walked away from it all, it’s the moment in the middle of the night when you start to daydream about something else, something you never imagined.”
“It’s the feeling you have when you think you might have hit a new low, and yet you’ve never felt so good,” she added. “Sometimes it’s admitting that you can’t stop yourself from fucking up what matters, that you feel your strongest. And as my mom would say, it’s often when we’re fucking up what matters, that we’re learning the most about ourselves.”