Pennsylvania’s Tigers Jaw returns with the release of ‘Lost on You,’ pushing new creative ground with 11 new tracks

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Pennsylvania rock band Tigers Jaw is back with their seventh studio album, “Lost on You,” serving as a snapshot of the group’s evolving creative direction over the last two decades.

The album is the follow-up to “I Won’t Care How You Remember Me,” which was released in 2021. Delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the group’s touring cycle carried into the timeline for the latest release. Vocalist and guitarist Ben Walsh said the band wanted to take their time during the writing process.

“We didn’t want to force anything or rush anything,” Walsh said. “We wanted to just get together really casually and go through ideas and give everything a lot of time to kind of grow.”

For the first time, the band scrapped its usual writing process, trading demos for loose ideas that took shape through jam sessions.

“Ben is someone who plays every instrument. He could bring you a demo where everything is done,” Co-vocalist and keyboardist Brianna Collins said. “But this time, he came in with not concrete ideas, or we would jam at practice, and then it would turn into a song. That has never really been the way that we’ve operated as a band with writing.”

One of the songs that resulted from a collaborative process was the lead single, “Head is Like a Sinking Stone,” which opens with a dueling guitar riff. The idea was brought to the table by guitarist Mark Lebiecki, the newest member.

“He wrote that riff and then we practiced it,” Collins said. “Ben had an idea of taking that and then adding another part that he had been working on to it, and then bringing it back.”

Walsh said the slowed-down approach allowed the band to charter new creative ground.

“It just allowed us to really explore a lot of different ideas,” Walsh said. “Some stuff that maybe previously would have just kind of remained on the cutting room floor, we pushed it a little further and entered new territory with an idea and it became something different.”

The chorus for the song “Primary Colors” was something Walsh wrote years ago, with the song’s outro originally being used as a verse.

“And something just wasn’t quite clicking, and everything that I tried felt kind of forced,” Walsh said. “We were all just like, ‘Yeah, there’s something here, but it’s not quite doing what I think it has the potential to do.’”

The band then started toying with the dynamics between the verses and the chorus.

“It just unlocked something for me in the idea where I was like, ‘Wow, this kind of quiet, loud, quiet, loud format really works well with this song,’” Walsh said. “So yeah, it just transformed it instantly into an idea that felt a lot stronger.”

The album was recorded with Grammy-winning producer Will Yip, a relationship still budding from their 2014 album, “Charmer.” Collins said the new album’s sound is “as true as we could be to playing the record live.”

“I wasn’t as tied to the tones that have classically been Tigers Jaw because I think at this point, I’ve just come to this realization that no matter what, if we’re making it, it is Tigers Jaw,” Collins said.

The new album has a “palpable energy” that shares the same spirit as their earlier records, Walsh said. And while “tastes evolve,” the band followed “what feels good.”

“This is the best representation of the band at the time, and it’s almost like a snapshot of us as artists, as people, as a creative entity over this time in our career,” he said.

“Lost On You” is out now through Hopeless Records and is available on vinyl, CD and various streaming platforms.

On April 16, Tigers Jaw will perform at Union Transfer at 8 p.m. They will be supported by Hot Flash Heat Wave and Creeks, the solo project of Balance and Composure vocalist and guitarist Jon Simmons, who is from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.