Tegan And Sara - Still Jealous (LP) - Red Opaque Vinyl

When Tegan and Sara revisited their 2004 breakthrough with Still Jealous in 2022, it felt less like a nostalgia play and more like a quiet conversation between past and present selves. So Jealous was the record that tipped them from indie cult heroes to a wider world, thanks to songs like Walking With a Ghost and Where Does the Good Go, the former famously covered by The White Stripes a year later, the latter etched into prime time memory via Grey’s Anatomy. Still Jealous takes that DNA and flips the perspective, with the twins swapping lead vocals on each other’s songs and stripping the arrangements back to the bone. The result is a set of intimate, sighing reworks that lean into their shared sensibility rather than the push and pull of a full band.

The first thing you notice is how close the voices feel. The original album had plenty of nervy energy, spiky guitars and sticky hooks that clung to your brain for days. Here the tempos soften, the breathing room widens, and the lines land like confessions instead of declarations. Walking With a Ghost in this context stops pacing the corridor and sits on the edge of the bed. You can hear the bite of the melody, but you also hear the ache that sat under it all along. Where Does the Good Go, a song that once felt like an open window, becomes a late night kitchen table chat. That shift, from public to private, gives Still Jealous its power.

Swapping leads does something sneaky to the material. Tegan singing a song originally led by Sara, and Sara taking on Tegan’s cuts, turns each track into a mirror. You start hearing the writer through the other twin’s phrasing, the way they lean on a word or soften a consonant. It is not a showy exercise. There are no big reinventions, no flashy production tricks, just close mics, light guitar, a little keyboard colour, and those familiar harmonies arriving like an old friend on your doorstep. The focus stays on the writing. Lines that once rushed past now sit in the centre of the room and stare you down.

You Wouldn’t Like Me is a good example. On So Jealous it sparkled with nervous energy, like someone trying to laugh off a punch to the gut. Here it turns conversational, small changes in cadence mak­ing the self doubt feel less like a hook and more like a truth you tell yourself at 1 am. Speak Slow loses the barbed-wire edges and gains a tender gravity. Downtown becomes less of a sprint and more of a steady walk through the same neighbourhoods, noticing different landmarks. The sequencing mirrors the 2004 record, which keeps the storytelling intact while letting these new performances tease out subtext that might have been buried by tempo and volume.

There is a pleasing sense of continuity with their catalogue too. Fans who came in through The Con or Sainthood will recognise the way their later work leaned into detail and dynamic restraint. Still Jealous feels like the missing link, the quiet thread that ran under the surface back then made fully audible now. It also has that twin magic that has always set Tegan and Sara apart. Plenty of bands harmonise. Few share a musical vocabulary so deep that a simple vocal swap can recast familiar songs and still feel fully, unmistakably theirs.

If you are crate digging, Still Jealous vinyl is a lovely companion to the original pressing of So Jealous. The intimacy of these recordings suits a living room spin, late evening, volume low, the needle catching the tiniest breaths between lines. For anyone hunting Tegan and Sara vinyl, pairing the two tells a neat story about growth and perspective. And if you prefer to buy Tegan and Sara records online, most shops that specialise in singer songwriter cuts will have copies, often alongside Tegan and Sara albums on vinyl from the past two decades. I have even seen it tucked into new release sections in a couple of Melbourne record store haunts where the staff recommend it to folks chasing vinyl records Australia wide.

Context matters here. The 2022 release arrived not as a greatest hits retread but as a conversation starter, a reminder that these songs were built to carry weight in different lights. It also nods to the history that keeps them in the modern canon. The White Stripes cover did not happen by accident, and Grey’s Anatomy did not pick a filler track. The writing on So Jealous was sharp, economical, and emotionally direct. Still Jealous trusts that foundation. It does not try to outshine youth. It lets experience do the colouring in.

Put simply, this is the sound of two artists taking stock, swapping places, and finding new meaning in the familiar. It is a gift to long time listeners and a surprisingly welcoming entry point for the curious. Spin it next to the 2004 record and you will hear time itself at work, not as erosion, but as polish.