Tennis is an American indie pop band from Denver which is made up of husband-and-wife duo Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley.
[4][5] The couple started the band after they returned from an eight-month sailing expedition on the Eastern Atlantic Seaboard after their graduation.
[8] Their first releases, both in July 2010, were the "Baltimore" EP on the Underwater Peoples label and the "South Carolina" single on Fire Talk.
[16] The band made several television appearances during 2012, performing "Origins" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 21,[17] "It All Feels the Same" on Late Night with David Letterman on April 9,[18] and "My Better Self" and "High Road" on Conan on July 25.
In a feature on the album, NPR Fresh Air's Terry Gross said, "Can you re-invent lively pop from the distant past?...songwriting team Tennis does just that with their new third album, Ritual in Repeat", while NPR's critic Milo Miles said, "On Ritual in Repeat, it's like Moore and Riley discover just how much ancient Latin, or in this case extinct pop styles, is their natural language".
On March 29, 2015, Tennis performed at Burger Records' Burgerama 4 festival in Santa Ana south of Fullerton, California.
[24] In early 2016, Moore and Riley again took a sailboat journey in the Pacific Ocean, intended to provide inspiration for their next album with their sailing experience being blogged by Urban Outfitters.
[30] Tennis appeared at the 2017 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival,[31] and toured supporting Spoon and the Shins.
[36] The three songs appeared as tracks 4, 2, and 3 (respectively) on Tennis's fifth album, released February 14, 2020,[37] titled Swimmer, again self-produced on Moore and Riley's Mutually Detrimental label.
[42] In 2021 Tennis collaborated with the cartoon show Rick and Morty to produce the song “Borrowed Time”, which aired on episode 9 of Season 5, “Forgetting Sarick Mortshall”.