Tigers Jaw - Lost On You

Ben Walsh and Brianna Collins have been making records together for the better part of two decades now, and 'Lost On You' - their seventh Tigers Jaw album - sounds like a band balancing music with adult life: parenthood, stability and a more deliberate approach to touring, which may explain the record’s unhurried confidence.

Produced by Will Yip, whose fingerprints are all over the best emo-adjacent records of the last fifteen years, the album settles into a comfortable space between power-pop warmth and indie-rock precision, and if comfort is occasionally its limitation, it is also, more often, where its strength lies.

'It's Ok' opens; Walsh's vocal delivery is unhurried, sitting atop a guitar tone that favours clean shimmer over distortion. 'Breezer' is the track where all those comparisons to Jimmy Eat World feel most warranted. The mid-tempo drive, the emphasis on melody over aggression - it recalls 'Bleed American'-era songwriting without mimicking it directly. Walsh and Collins have always had an ear for the kind of hook that rewards patience, and this is a fine example: a song that improves with each listen.

The record's thematic backbone - conversations with past, present and future selves - gives 'Lost On You' a conceptual weight. 'Head Is Like A Sinking Stone' is one of the album's most immediate moments, its chorus surging upward against the lyrical gravity, rooted in a recurring childhood dream that finds beauty in otherwise unsettling moments.

Title-track 'Lost On You' closes proceedings, and it is the right choice for a final statement. The song builds patiently, layering instruments and voices until the final chorus arrives with a fullness that the rest of the album has been carefully withholding.

Twenty years on, 'Lost On You' sounds like a record made by people who know exactly what they do well, and, crucially, when to leave space for it to breathe.