Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
AbsolutePunk	90%
Alternative Press
Consequence of Sound
Drowned in Sound
Pitchfork Media	(7.3/10)
Rolling Stone
Sputnikmusic	(3.9/5)
The A.V. Club	(B+)
Vice

Heartthrob is the seventh studio album by Canadian pop duo Tegan and Sara, released on January 29, 2013 on Neil Young's label Vapor Records through Warner Bros. Records. Heartthrob debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200 chart, selling 49,000 copies in its first week and securing the band's highest chart position to date. It is also the first Tegan and Sara record to chart in New Zealand, the UK and Ireland. On July 4, 2013, Heartthrob was certified Gold in Canada. As of April 2016, Heartthrob has sold 199,000 copies in the United States.

In November 2011, it was revealed that Tegan and Sara were writing new material for their seventh studio album. Tegan said that "(we) are back in our home studios working away at more songs. We’re really looking forward to making a new record now. Our hope is to be in the studio by early 2012." As for the what the album will sound like, she stated "…we’re not really sure of that either. We’re meeting with lots of different producers, writing lots of different types of songs, and challenging ourselves to do a lot of really new things within those songs. So hopefully it sounds like T+S but with a whole new element of awesomeness."

Tegan and Sara started recording their seventh studio album on February 20, 2012, and finished recording in May of the same year. While making the record, the band released a series of eight videos documenting the recording process, entitled "Carpool Confessional".

In recording and producing what Rolling Stone called their "most commercial record of their career", Sara Quin said:

"We didn't want to take a small step. We wanted to take a big step. We felt like we closed out our decade with Sainthood. We turned 30 at the end of that album and we had officially been in the industry making music professionally for a decade. This is the time to say, 'What is Tegan and Sara now? What is the future gonna look like for this band?' Some of the answers were really boring....We went through numbers: 'How much do we want to sell? What kind of venues do we want to play? What's our dream size of venue? What countries do we want to play that we haven't played before?' We took all that information and said to ourselves, 'OK, we can't make another record that sounds like what people expect from Tegan and Sara. We can make a record that maybe marries what we've done with the band in the past and then work with a producer who is going to help us embellish and sort of amp up the sound a bit.' I honestly didn't know what to expect from this process. Tegan and I work extensively, independently on our own, writing and creating full demos with bass drums, programming, the whole thing. We're used to keeping a little bit of that, and adding other musicians into it. Within a day or two in the studio with Greg Kurstin, I was like, 'Oh my God, this is amazing.' It was very obvious he wasn't going to take gentle, slow steps towards something. He was just going to throw it out. If we didn't like it, he would throw it out, but he wasn't going to fool around."

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