Final Serve: This Iconic Denver Band Is Retiring After a Whirlwind Career

Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore are finally serving match point.

It took fifteen years, but the husband-and-wife duo behind Denver indie-pop darling Tennis is officially calling it a career.

The announcement accompanied the news of Tennis's latest and final album, Face Down in the Garden, released on April 25 via the band's label, Mutually Detrimental. The two musicians see their seventh record and upcoming five-month tour as a fitting way to send a proper farewell to their many fans after an unexpectedly fruitful and wildly successful run.

Moore and Riley met at the University of Colorado Denver in 2008 while studying music, and started Tennis as a side project after graduating and returning from their first sailing trip together. Neither had much experience — Moore had only sung in youth church choirs — but they knew they could handle being weekend warriors while looking for more serious, real-world jobs.

Moore mulled over going to law school, while Riley did installation work at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The couple quietly put out a single, “South Carolina,” then an EP, Baltimore, in July 2010. A debut album, Cape Dory, which included the three songs from Baltimore, followed in 2011. It ended up landing on NPR’s radar, and Tennis — the moniker an ode to Riley’s past life as an actual tennis instructor — had legs.

Riley is still surprised by the overnight hype that Cape Dory and a subsequent sold-out tour drummed up.

“That was the first moment we knew, ‘Oh, woah, maybe we should consider quitting our jobs because people are offering real money for us to pursue this,’” he says. “We didn’t know we were going to do this for a living, so our first album, I think we wrote it in like two weeks.”
Though admittedly unprepared, Tennis became their full-time focus. Being caught in the maelstrom of rising fame felt overwhelming, Moore remembers.

“We saw some critiques early on, especially in Denver, saying that we were getting more than we deserved. What was funny is that I actually agreed," she admits. "I was like, ‘You’re right, we haven’t earned this, we’ve been a band for five minutes. I don’t even feel like I can do this.’ It was a really crazy experience."

Fortunately, Moore and Riley stuck it out and can now rest easy knowing they committed their young-adult years to building Tennis into one of the city’s biggest and best indie exports of the last two decades.

“It feels so good to be on the other side of it and be like, ‘Okay, we’ve been doing this for years. We know how to make a record. We know how to tour,’” Moore explains. “In this weird way, once we finally got to this point where we feel like we’re firing on all cylinders, we really know what we’re doing, we actually feel done. We feel like we’ve just taken the band as far as we want to take it — or really could in a way that makes sense with who we are as people and artists. It feels like it’s time to move on.”
So while the swan song might seem sudden, the decision had been a long time coming, particularly given Moore’s health concerns while on the road in 2021, when she fainted after contracting a virus. After that, it only felt right to be honest about where they were at, the duo says.

“We actually knew right away that it was going to be our last record. What we didn’t know for sure is if we wanted to lead with that in our messaging,” Moore explains.

“We were worried about the album. We wanted it to stand on its own feet as an album and not get buried in the narrative of us retiring,” she continues. “But then, as things were progressing, we realized that if we were in the position of our fans, I would want to know that it was the band’s last album and tour, so we finally decided to go ahead and be open about that.”
It’s a sweet sentiment that falls in line with Moore’s endearing writing style — forthright and autobiographical, a Tennis trademark. On Face Down in the Garden, it’s evident that she and Riley didn’t hold back, again pouring themselves into the nine tracks, as they’ve always done. They don’t know any other way, so culminating a decade-plus of dedication, ups and downs, success and sorrow into a well-packaged thirty minutes proved to be no easy task.

“We thought it was going to be freeing, but it ended up being like handcuffs,” Riley shares. “When you start thinking about, ‘Oh, we’re kind of a real band now with an actual fanbase. What are people going to remember us by?’ This last album became so important. We actually got buried by the heft of the existential order that it was demanding.”

“It’s why the album is so short, because we kept throwing away songs,” Moore adds. “We had written so many more songs, but our filter was so refined we just kept saying, ‘This is the last thing we’re going to say as Tennis, so there can’t be filler.’ It was really tough.”

In an age of information overload and endless content creation, it’s refreshing to hear they would rather trim the superfluous instead of putting something out for the sake of it. It also makes Face Down in the Garden, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Pollen (2023), as poignant a Tennis record as any. Of course, it showcases Moore’s serenading siren calls paired with her piano playing and Riley’s hypnotically soothing guitar and bass licks.

“My number-one goal was to have a strong emotional core to the songs lyrically. I experimented with a lot of stream-of-conscious singing to just try and let the language come to me,” Moore says, adding that each offering conveys “an absolute emotional truth.

“I wanted to take a risk emotionally. It’s easy to guard myself with logic or ambiguity with what I’m trying to say, so that no one can hold me accountable for what I said if they don’t like it. A lot of that was my own insecurity. I really wanted to try write with a different kind of wisdom that was less rational, more emotional because I feel like often, I’m too guarded to let myself do that. That was my biggest goal with this album.”
Such songs as “12 Blown Tires,” “At the Apartment” and “Always the Same” are testaments to the couple’s unfettered expressionism, making it hard to believe the band is done creating such moving music. From the outside looking in, there seems to be more left in the Tennis tank, but as Moore and Riley confidently confide, they’ve completely emptied the well and are content in knowing they’ve said everything they’ve wanted to as Tennis.

So when both respond with an emphatic “no” when asked if they ever second-guessed retirement while crafting Face Down in the Garden, we take their word for it — even though a future without Tennis seems hard to accept.

The two have done whatever’s necessary to navigate the sea change of the music industry since first forming in 2010, but it’s time to head for harbor. “We have had a really, really big career. We never knew this was going to continue on this long,” Riley explains. “We always thought, ‘At some point, people are going to want to stop hearing our music, and we’re going to fade,’ and it just never happened. Fast forward to now, we’ll have played over 1,000 shows since we started. We have definitely put in way more than 10,000 hours doing this. We’re just at this spot.”

Artists simply have to do more to sustain a viable livelihood, he adds, pointing to several behind-the-scenes aspects that are often overlooked, including declining royalty revenues forcing musicians to take on more tasks that were traditionally hired out. It’s not the sexiest thing to talk about, but that’s the reality.

For example, on the band's final run, which kicks off May 16 in Vegas and includes a Denver date with Real Estate on Tuesday, August 26, at the Mission Ballroom, Riley is still doubling as tour manager and van driver. “We’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a very long time," he says, "and it’s clear that the candle is reducing at a quicker rate than we were expecting."
Tennis caught fire right from the beginning, when its studio debut, Cape Dory, went viral with the help of early social network website MySpace. A whimsical retelling of Moore and Riley’s first nautical adventure together — an eight-month sailing trip across the Eastern Atlantic Seaboard — the album made waves in the budding “blog rock” DIY scene back then. Record deals and late-night TV appearances — Leno, Letterman, Conan — quickly followed the 2012 release of sophomore LP Young & Old. All of a sudden, Tennis became a household name.

“It felt like too much too fast,” Moore admits now, especially for a budding band with no expectations of touring nationally, let alone blowing up so big.

Luckily, Tennis is a quick study. The momentum didn’t subside, and the band, which currently includes longtime touring drummer Steve Voss and bassist Ryan Tullock, built an impressive indie-rock resume. There are many buzzworthy ballads, particularly on the chart-topping Yours Conditionally (2017), and memorable shows, including the special “The Music of David Lynch” event, hosted by the David Lynch Foundation, in 2015. Tennis even collaborated with the popular cartoon show Rick and Morty on a single, “Borrowed Time,” for a 2021 episode.

But headlining Red Rocks in 2022, post-COVID, was “the most memorable show of our entire lives," Riley says.

“Pretty much everyone cried. We cried, a lot of people in the crowd were crying. It was just this moment of release for everyone,” he says of their first and only appearance at the longstanding Colorado music cathedral.
It’s been a good run, no doubt, and before saying goodbye, Tennis is sharing an EP of deep cuts — Neutral Poetry: First Recordings, Unreleased Demos 2009-2010 — on May 16. Putting out the latest and earliest versions of themselves so close together was intentional, Moore explains.

“I hear all the potential and so much freedom and a lack of self-consciousness in the songwriting,” she says. “We don’t have that anymore, but I remember what it was like to have it, and it was really, really special. It just felt really sweet to remember ourselves at that stage.”

After the curtains close on Tennis for the last time in September, the couple is planning a sailing trip, a favorite pastime that’s interwoven into their music. But Moore and Riley are pondering selling their boat afterwards and settling into a “life of stillness,” as Moore describes it. Whether that includes making music in some form or other, time will tell, but right now she is more focused on a memoir project that she started five years ago, while Riley wouldn’t mind getting back into the remodeling biz, given his former gig as a contractor.

“I’m turning forty this year and the most exotic thing I can think of is just being home, having plants or a dog and helping your friend move because you’re there, or going to your friend’s engagement party because you’re actually home,” Moore says.

“I want those things. Those are some of the sacrifices we’ve made to prioritize other things, our creative life, a life of seeing the world and traveling,” she concludes. “It’s been amazing. We started all of these things when we were 22, but I’m definitely ready for this new chapter of stillness and groundedness.”

Tennis, with Real Estate, 7 p.m. Tuesday, August 26, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street. Tickets are $45-$109.