Tigercub is a rock band from Brighton, England that formed in 2011 by vocalist and guitarist Jamie Stephen Hall and drummer James Allix who met a university and joined by bassist Jimi Wheelright in 2012. From its earliest releases the trio has demonstrated a knack for crafting commanding hard rock with a cinematic sensibility that it has consistently evolved into a body of work that has expanded its range and variety of expression across now three albums including arguably its most fully realized work to date with 2023’s The Perfume of Decay. The group’s 2021 album As Blue as Indigo delved deep into themes of anxiety, depression, mortality and loss. The latest release found the band exploring the use of found tapes that Hall had been collecting from old Dictaphone machines found in thrift stores as a layer of atmosphere that served as almost a sonic canvass upon which its hard rocking sound could find a subtle context. It’s a subtle effect but for the keen listener there’s a certain something to the music on the record that lends it an emotional impact like a well chosen setting and time of year can add something unmistakable and compelling to a film.

For the new album some of the themes of the previous offering linger as emotional fallout and reflecting the kinds of experiences we all go through when we’ve been through a particularly traumatic period and have to return to going through the usual daily experiences with a different emotional lens having been changed by grief and existential turmoil. For the new record the group seems to have taken in the influence of early shoegaze and Can in terms of working out the underlying moods and atmospherics and challenging themselves to produce something another level of creative ambition with its arrangements. You can hear the impact of Queens of the Stone Age in its fluid use of heavy guitar and rhythms but in its perhaps not as obvious ear for the aesthetics of electronic music and in the structure of where the sounds sit in the mix one might compare Tigercub to Failure whose own fusion of hard rock, post-punk and the influence of cinematic sound design has yielded its own career of noteworthy records.

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