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Tigers Jaw
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Despite our deepest desires, time only continues to move forward, slowly and incessantly. We attempt to understand the present through our conceptions of the past, and we hope to use that understanding to guide the future. These simple chronological divisions offer us a simple way to organize our lives: where we’ve been, where we are now, where we hope to be. Despite their connections, they feel disparate, always looking at one through the lens of another. On their new record Lost on You, the band’s seventh full-length, Tigers Jaw pose a much more holistic idea: we exist in all of these timelines at once.
Formed in 2005 by high school friends from Scranton, PA, Tigers Jaw have long been an important and revered band. They quickly gained attention for their ability to effectively and cooly capture teenage emotions, with equal parts upbeat angst and mellow moodiness. And now, two decades later, the band is still going. Ben Walsh (guitar, vocals) and Brianna Collins (keys, vocals), alongside the expanded lineup featuring Mark Lebiecki (guitar), Colin Gorman (bass), and Teddy Roberts (drums), continue their legacy into a new era.
Lost on You is a continuation of what we’ve always loved about Tigers Jaw. There’s the powerful and pounding rhythm section, the great melodic leads that shift from instrument to instrument, and, as always, the interchanging and overlapping vocals. With five years since their last release, Walsh noted that the band “wanted to feel confident in the material we have and let things progress naturally.” And so they took their time finding what felt right, even though, of course, life continued on all around them. They reunited with producer and engineer Will Yip (Turnstile, Movements) at his famed Studio 4 in Pennsylvania to capture this moment, this solid and yet very strange period of middle adulthood where we are supposed to have shaken off the uncertainty of adolescence and yet are still plagued by many of the same problems.
The result is a Tigers Jaw record as great as you’d expect. Songs like “Primary Colors” and “Baptized on a Redwood Drive” find the band embracing a driving midtempo similar to alt rock heroes Jimmy Eat World or Weezer, with other tracks like “Head is Like a Sinking Stone” and “BREEZER” feeling so classic that the best reference is Tigers Jaw themselves. They sing about blades and knives, anxieties and intentions, and timeless TJ topics like two worlds and ghosts.
And while this record is decidedly from the present, it is deeply embedded in their history. There are many moments that would feel just as at home sung along to at the defunct Scranton venue Test Pattern as they would in the huge halls of Philadelphia’s Union Transfer, a venue probably ten-times as large that they are now able to sell out. This is not surprising. The scene’s present moment owes a lot to Tigers Jaw; their contributions have helped pave the way for this entire world, and still the group continues on.
And that’s the thing, Tigers Jaw was the band that wrote those songs before and they still are the band writing these songs now. You can plainly hear it. Tigers Jaw show us the possibility of realizing all versions of ourselves. We are our former, present, and future selves in one being, filled with prescience and past. These songs are portals taking us between different parts of the band’s life and even our own lives, showing us how we can understand time not as a linear narrative but as something that is all real and knowable at once. They weren’t able to get here without starting somewhere else—somewhere we as fans can instantly recognize and relate to. And while where they are going may still be unknown to us, we can see traces of it here already. It’s uncertain but true, something we are constantly grappling with as time continues to inevitably pass. But there is beauty in it if we can accept it, finding contentment in just attempting to know ourselves. As Collins sings on “Primary Colors,” “I understand it all now/It’s not supposed to make sense.”
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