As tracklists go, you don’t get much more evocative than the one attached to Tegan and Sara’s ninth album, a series of furiously indignant, laughably melodramatic and stomach-churningly poignant missives from the standard-issue internal monologue of the unhappy teenager. It’s tempting to leave the likes of Hold My Breath Until I Die and Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie) as song titles alone, imagining the contents to fit your own heady nostalgia trip. But if you do decide to dive in, you’ll discover plenty more painfully perfect evocations of adolescent angst inside.

Hey, I’m Just Like You is not merely an exercise in remembrance, however. In a pleasingly poetic act of artistic time travel, the 39-year-old Quin twins actually co-created the album with their teenage selves. The 12 tracks included here are tweaked versions of songs they wrote between the ages of 15 and 17, discovered on cassette while excavating material for their new memoir, High School. Perhaps because of the tinkering, the record doesn’t quite have the mortifying novelty value of actual juvenilia, and those familiar with Tegan and Sara’s artistic trajectory might detect a whiff of anachronism about the way these songs have been realised. The duo started life as an indie-rock outfit, pivoting to pop in the early 2010s with their album Heartthrob – Hey, I’m Just Like You feels of a piece with their more recent work. Although there are traces of the sisters’ early infatuation with bands such as Green Day (especially on the chugging I’ll Be Back Someday), the defining sound is slick, pulsing and often pretty saccharine.

There are some pleasing interludes, particularly the doomy drop on Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie), but it’s not always a style that proves hugely diverting, being a sort of beta-pop that falls into the cracks between instantly memorable, innovative and entertainingly extravagant. Certainly, Hey, I’m Just Like You has a cracking backstory, but the album’s workaday synthpop means it struggles to make much of an impact based purely on its sonic appeal.