Think, a second, about all the idiocy that you’ve endured over the course of your working life. The foreman who—for zero discernible reason—insisted that the boxes be stacked this way, not that way. The ditchdigger supervisor who demanded that you pile the dirt of the left-hand side of the trench rather than the right-hand side. The IT idjit who answered every perfectly reasonable question with a nonsensicle riddle—if, that is, he deigned to respond at all.

Such memories are guaranteed to maximize your enjoyment of “Fucking Up What Matters”, the new single and video from Canadian indie heroes Tegan and Sara.

As for all of us, the past couple of years have brought changes for the Quin twins. The big one is that Tegan and Sara have fled the major-label system for Mom+Pop Music, the indie label that’s home to the blue-chip likes of Sleater-Kinney and Courtney Barnett.

“Fucking Up What Matters” sets the table for Tegan and Sara’s upcoming, as yet-untitled 10th album (and first for Mom+Pop).

Tegan Quin explains the song and clip as follows: “'Fucking Up What Matters' felt like an ode to the moment in your life when you realize that you have most, if not all of the things you wanted and you start to think about what would happen if you just walked away from it all. It's the moment in the middle of the night when you start to daydream about something else, something you never imagined.  It's the feeling you have when you think you might have hit a new low, and yet you've never felt so good.  Sometimes it's admitting that you can't stop yourself from fucking up what matters, that you feel your strongest.  And as my mom would say, it's often when we're fucking up what matters, that we're learning the most about ourselves.”

Music biz neophytes who’ve never made a video, and dream of doing so, will find the five-minute video endlessly informative. And horrifying.

Don’t forget to invent a new TikTok dance, pay attention to the importance of hair, makeup, and wardrobe, and go out of your way to make normal activies (baking a cake, driving a car, getting a tattoo) seem endlessly enjoyable.

An even bigger life lesson?

That would be a heads up that sometimes you’re going to have to sit there politely while some hopelessly clueless, stone-cold cretin talks about what makes a great video. And, by proxy, how your arts and music coverage might be significantly improved if you’d only write things in a fashion that the average 4th grader might understand. But only if that 4th grader is in the remedial-reading stream.