Tegan and Sara have promised that their new album Hey, I’m Just Like You will transport you back to their teenage years. If the title of their new song is any indication, then they really meant it.
On Friday (Sept. 20), the duo released their new track “Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie),” a moody pop-punk confessional where Tegan and Sara beg their listeners not to take their words as gospel, because they aren’t always telling the truth. “I don’t want to be a liar, but I do it every day,” they sing.
The new lyric video for the track, similarly, sees the twins taking aim at their own words — as they sing the new track, each of the words on the screen are sequentially redacted and crossed out, as though they’re trying to take them back.
In a statement, Sara said that the song was, in part, inspired by an episode of the classic ’80s sitcom Punky Brewster. “Our mother tells a story about watching [it] with us when we were four years old,” she said. “The episode’s morality tale focused on lying, and near the end of the show, she describes one of us climbing onto her back, sobbing into her neck and confessing a lie we’d told her earlier in the day. At 15, we started telling lies again, and we absolved ourselves constantly in the lyrics of our songs.”
The track comes just ahead of a whirlwind fall for the sister duo — next week alone, Tegan and Sara will be releasing their new memoir High School, their ninth studio album Hey, I’m Just Like You and kicking off their “special acoustic, multi-dimensional tour” in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Check out the lyric video for Tegan and Sara’s “Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie)” below: