Nearly five decades after forming, the NWOBHM survivors and thrivers are back with Electrifyed, their latest slab of British heavy metal — and, frankly, they sound bloody furious.
This is not a nostalgia trip. This isn’t Wild Cat 2.0. Nor is it the sort of heritage-rock exercise where everyone stands around wearing denim, remembering 1981 and wondering where the years went. The Tygers have remembered something much more important:
They’re still a fucking metal band.
With founding guitarist Robb Weir still flying the flag, Electrifyed finds the Tygers in a particularly hungry mood. The current line-up — vocalist Jack Meille, drummer Craig Ellis, bassist Huw Holding, Weir and new guitarist John Foottit — has spent the last few years refining the band’s sound rather than simply recreating its past. The album was built collaboratively, with riffs, melodies and arrangements developed between the members before being taken into the studio with producer Marco Angioni. The intention was to recapture some of the directness and raw energy of the band’s early years while giving the material the weight and clarity of a modern production.
From the opening seconds of “Rise Up!”, Electrifyed makes its intentions brutally clear.
Guitars.
Lots of them.
Weir and Foottit provide the album’s central weapon: a twin-guitar attack that manages to sound traditional without becoming embarrassingly retro. There’s a pleasing lack of studio wizardry here, too. The songs are allowed to breathe, the riffs are allowed to hit and the rhythm section is given plenty of room to actually sound like a rhythm section.
And Meille remains one of the band’s secret weapons as his voice has enough grit to sell the heavier material, but he knows when to ease back and let the melodies do the work.
It’s classic British metal without the sepia filter.
Meanwhile, the title track, “Electrifyed”, is the obvious monster. Big riff. Bigger chorus. Twin guitars. Maximum volume. It’s the sort of song that makes you instinctively reach for an imaginary beer, even if you’re sitting on a train at 9am.
“Forevermore” shows the band’s melodic side, proving that the Tygers haven’t forgotten the importance of a hook amid all the riffage. Then comes “The Powers That Be”, which is heavier, darker and considerably less interested in asking permission.
But the real bruiser is “The Nail”.
This thing stomps into the room wearing steel-toe-capped boots and immediately starts kicking the furniture. It’s slower and heavier than some of the album’s more traditional NWOBHM fare, and the combination of the guitars and Ellis’ drumming gives it a wonderfully nasty swagger.
Elsewhere, “Dark Divinity” and “A Shadow On Fire” add darker shades, while “The Fight Goes On” delivers exactly the sort of defiant statement you’d expect from a band that has survived almost every musical trend thrown at it.
The Tygers were there at the birth of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Alongside Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard and their contemporaries, they helped create a sound that would influence generations of metal bands.
But history only gets you so far.
They’ve survived because they’ve continued to write new music, change personnel, evolve and — most importantly — sound like they actually want to be here. Weir could quite reasonably spend his time playing the old favourites to an audience of people who remember buying Wild Cat when it was first released.
Instead, he’s still writing riffs. Still playing shows. Still bringing new musicians into the fold. And still making new records.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s stubbornness. And in heavy metal, stubbornness is often a superpower.
The Tygers helped build this particular house. They don’t need to knock it down and rebuild it every time they release an album.
It’s heavy without being miserable, melodic without being soft and traditional without disappearing up its own leather trousers.
Donnie’s Rating: 8/10
