Tegan and Sara, “Crybaby.”

It’s hard to believe Tegan and Sara are on their 10th album. The twin Quin sisters broke out of Vancouver largely on the strength of their fourth album, 2004’s So Jealous, and have since gone platinum and won multiple awards. Their new album, Crybaby, was spawned partly by Sara playing with a sampling app.

They took demos mostly built from these loops to the studio with producer John Congleton (The War on Drugs, St. Vincent). Crybaby finds the sisters, maybe, not doing so hot. Tegan-penned songs like “Fucking Up What Matters,” “Pretty Shitty Day” and “Smoking Weed Alone” sound like she was having a tough time.

Of the album title, Tegan said she envied children’s ability to be crybabies: “I’d feel better if I could just toss myself on the ground and have a good ol’ tantrum. And then stand up and be totally recovered, because [I] got it all out of [my] system.”

That attitude starts right away with lead track “I Can’t Grow Up,” a wildly catchy tantrum of a pop song. If this album has a fault, it’s that Tegan and Sara lean overly hard into the vocal loops. Every song on Crybaby is either built around or liberally festooned with vocal loops, but underneath them is the same solid songwriting chops the two have always displayed. “So lemme lemme get what I want/ And when you break it off/ Get me up and back to the start/ ‘Cause I can’t grow up,” the chorus goes, and it’s a stinging self-indictment even as she criticizes her partner: “You’re always cut-cut-cutting me off!”

After the stress of lockdowns, the sisters are here to blow off steam, venting about loved ones and themselves. “Fucking Up What Matters” is upbeat and danceable, even as its lyrics express depression and dismay. “I’m not trying to destroy us, I just hate what we’ve become/ Without you, I feel empty but around you, I feel numb,” they sing over a propulsive beat and frenetic synths.

A particular highlight of the album is “Yellow,” a slower song with a hook that hits straight to the heart. “This bruise ain’t black, it’s yellow/ My sweet heart breaks, so be careful,” Tegan and Sara sing. If you listen hard enough, you can hear Luke Reynolds (Guster, Sharon Van Etten) on bass and Joey Waronker (Beck, Elliott Smith) on drums throughout this album, and though they’re a little low in the mix in favor of the vocal loops, their playing is spot-on and serves the songs artfully.

Tegan and Sara also play with how we think emotions should sound. “Pretty Shitty Time” has a jaunty, almost country-western feel to it, but the sisters’ voices combine to express sentiments like, “I’ve never been that good at saying when I’m hurting, but I’m hurting now.” “Under My Control” uses a confident, cheerleader-chant cadence to declare, “I should start working on myself again/ Get these feelings that I feel within/ … Under my control.” All these songs are very synth-heavy, as their work has been since 2013’s Heartthrob.

It’s to be expected that Tegan and Sara would, after all this time in music, continue to search out new ideas and new ways of building songs. The vocal loops are new, but the overly processed sounds seem more gimmicky than inspired. It would be interesting to hear an acoustic version of this album, like the duo recorded for So Jealous (titled Still Jealous), to see if the songs hold up without all the bells and whistles, because they probably would.

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.