Photo by Nicole Busch
“Lost on You” – produced/engineered by their longtime collaborator Will Yip (Turnstile, Movements) at his famed Studio 4 in Philadelphia – 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. 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.
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 “Lost on You“, Tigers Jaw pose a much more holistic idea: we exist in all of these timelines at once.
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. 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.
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.
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