TIGERCUB - Nets To Catch The Wind

There's a precise moment when Muse stopped being a guitar-rock band and became a spectacle-engineering project. Tigercub seem to have stopped one step earlier: same melodic ambition, same taste for the unexpected harmony in the middle of a riff, but with a conciseness that Bellamy's band has progressively abandoned. Across four albums, the Brighton trio have distilled something that holds together stoner, alternative and arena rock without letting the grandiosity smother the inspiration. The new "Nets To Catch The Wind" is where this synthesis works best.

The single "Fall In Fall Out" sounds like it's arrived straight from the days of "New Born" and "Plug In Baby": rough, classicist bass up front, a chorus that detonates with a minor fourth tinting the explosion in decadent splendour. The reference is immediate, but Tigercub have enough personality to make the comparison merely a starting point. Almost a romantic lied in electric guise, "Stuck In The Melancholy" builds tension through descending motions and dynamic play, triggering a solemn, melodramatic sweep; more ambiguous and biting, "Magic Sleep" instead has something bewitching in the way verse and guitar theme fuse together, luminous and unsettling at once.

Elsewhere, though, a more saturated, oblique soul emerges. "Head Over Heels" brings a conspicuous stoner streak to the surface, and elsewhere on the record Queens Of The Stone Age remain an obvious point of attraction, with their knack for being saturated and direct without giving up instant pop-rock recognisability. In "My Paper Heart", meanwhile, the big 6+8 riff with its shifting accents seems to recall Kansas's "Carry On Wayward Son", but in a far heavier, more biting form. "A Black Moon" pushes even further, with a keyboard line with a whiff of eurodance shrewdly alternated with chromatic, mighty guitar broadsides. The long-distance clash between the two elements stays with you for hours — and says a lot about how comfortable the band feels in such far-flung territories.

With two hundred thousand monthly listeners on Spotify, Tigercub still sit within the orbit of cult bands, far from the numbers of their most direct models but also from already-established acts like All Them Witches and Nothing But Thieves, who tap into the same potential audience. "Nets To Catch The Wind" could change something: it's a record that knows where it wants to go, and gets there with an ease that can't be faked.

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25/05/2026