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 their new record Lost on You, the band’s seventh full-length, Tigers Jaw pose a much more holistic idea: we exist in all of these timelines at once. Formed in 2005 by high school friends from Scranton, PA, Tigers Jaw have long been an important and revered band. They quickly gained attention for their ability to effectively and cooly capture teenage emotions, with equal parts upbeat angst and mellow moodiness. And now, two decades later, the band is still going. Ben Walsh (guitar, vocals) and Brianna Collins (keys, vocals), alongside the expanded lineup featuring Mark Lebiecki (guitar), Colin Gorman (bass), and Teddy Roberts (drums), continue their legacy into a new era. Lost on You 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. 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. They reunited with producer and engineer Will Yip (Turnstile, Movements) at his famed Studio 4 in Pennsylvania to capture this moment, this solid and yet very strange period of middle adulthood where we are supposed to have shaken off the uncertainty of adolescence and yet are still plagued by many of the same problems. 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. They sing about blades and knives, anxieties and intentions, and timeless TJ topics like two worlds and ghosts. 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. This is not surprising. The scene’s present moment owes a lot to Tigers Jaw; their contributions have helped pave the way for this entire world, and still the group continues on. And that’s the thing, Tigers Jaw was the band that wrote those songs before and they still are the band writing these songs now. You can plainly hear it. Tigers Jaw show us the possibility of realizing all versions of ourselves. We are our former, present, and future selves in one being, filled with prescience and past. 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. As Collins sings on “Primary Colors,” “I understand it all now/It’s not supposed to make sense.”

Pool Kids are energy. Raw, sporadic, and indisputably authentic, the four piece group originally hails from Tallahassee, FL. The band’s sunny Floridian disposition shines through in their mathy, intricate guitar work, which is matched only by the emotional vulnerability expressed in singer Christine Goodwyne’s lyricism. Pool Kids, the band’s masterful self-titled second album (out July 22, 2022), fuses fan-favorite math and art rock familiarities with a tide of emotional and technical growth, engulfing the listener in a wave of impassioned indie rock angst. A recording process that was flooded with both an outpouring of collaborative affection and with literal water, Pool Kids takes on a life of its own, representing not only the reformation of a submerged hope, but also the reconfiguration of a band that has expanded to find its final kinetic form. Pool Kids first emerged as a two-piece, with vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Christine Goodwyne and drummer Caden Clinton writing the entirety of the group’s 2018 LP, Music to Practice Safe Sex to. The new self-titled record finds the addition of bassist Nicolette Alvarez and guitarist Andy Anaya, together helping to shape the bright, genre-bending sound that bleeds and blends into each individual track. Post hardcore guitar riffs ripple on the surface of songs like “Further”, while the album concludes with the indie-folk-pop track “Pathetic”, ringing out like an synthy, heartbroken echo. Goodwyne explains, “This was our missing piece. We are a family, this is it, the truest form of the band.”  Pool Kids is more polished than ever. Crisp and layered, sound cascades out of the record like an avalanche, hard, cool, and blanketing. Structurally, the group moved away from the oft-chaotic arrangements on Music to Practice Safe Sex to, and instead leaned into more instantly memorable choruses. Goodwyne recounts, “I was listening to a lot of pop over the past year or two. I’ve been totally leaning into radiopop, like Charli XCX…Lady Gaga, very select Taylor Swift songs, and just really dissecting what I think is catchy and earwormy.”  Following the release of Music to Practice Safe Sex to, the long distance band was immediately hungry to create more. Spread out between the South, Northeast, and Midwest, Goodwyne recalls that the bleary eyed four-piece was ready to create together “IN PERSON. Not Postal-Service style”, unbeknownst to the Pandemic that would strike shortly after. Pool Kids were able to reunite three times, under the unobstructed skies of Moonshine Mountain, North Carolina, and in the bustle of Miami, Florida and Chicago, Illinois. Still, it was not until the three month recording session in 2021 under producer Mike Vernon Davis in Seattle, with the help of Samuel Rosson and Jake Barrow, that Pool Kids came together in full. Davis was crucial in fully realizing the songs on the album, adding synth textures and keyboard melodies, as well as boosting the overall morale of the band. And of course, the band’s morale did need boosting come September. Worn down and weary after staying up until 3 AM to finish recording the final song for the album, Pool Kids went to sleep feeling nervous. Alvarez fretted, “I feel like something bad is going to happen. This is just going too good.” And she was right. Not even three hours later, the group was shaken from the slumber with an ominous five words by assistant producer, Jake Barrow, “Bit of an emergency situation.” Heavy rain had flooded the basement of Isaac Brock’s Ice Cream Party studio, destroying equipment and nearly drowning the original recording of the album’s closer “Pathetic'' in a pool of electrified water. Goodwyne recalls, “The worst part about the flood was not even the gear, it was the momentum that it killed. We were so on one and spirits were so high and we’d really gotten into the flow…we could’ve walked away with a finished product if that flood never happened.”  The group reconvened several months later, determined not just to recreate what had been destroyed, but to better it. The shifting current that threatened to rip the album apart suddenly calmed upon Pool Kids’ reunion, and the band retired their exhaustion for collaborative perseverance. “It felt like magic was happening, we were meshing so well creatively, and just having so much fun. It’s really unbelievable how good of a match this whole crew was,” said Goodwyne. Not only was producer Samuel Rosson introduced into the picture, but drummer Caden Clinton’s handy cam footage of the flood was recovered. Now, on the final moments of the album, the sounds of the band sloshing through the flooded studio linger on as a reminder of endurance in the wake of disappointment.  Pool Kids is about regeneration—from trauma, from heartbreak, from culture. Goodwyne reaches into the murky depths of shared existence, pulling not only from her own struggles, but from the universality of emotion. Recovery from the dissolution of a seven year relationship and childhood religious trauma shape the most personal lyrics of the LP, but so do the topics that Goodwyne didn’t experience first hand. “Some of the details in the stories are not 100% accurate to my life, but the emotions behind them are personal to me. Moments of pain and hurt, like in Pathetic, feel so real and true to me and the situation…introducing that extra fictional character helped me to address [feelings of jealousy and pain] without being limited to the details of my reality,” explains Goodwyne. On standout track “I Hope You’re Right”, Goodwyne details the experience of a friend’s disrespected boundaries, disclosing that it’s about “men just not even realizing what they're doing that is harmful, thinking ‘I’m not like that’ while just being totally blind to what they're actually doing and not listening/accepting what you tell them when you try to explain.” What makes Pool Kids so impactful is the departure from this idea that for music to be personal, it must be unique to the writer. Pool Kids is personal because it’s personal to everyone.  Condensed Bio: Pool Kids are energy. Raw, sporadic, and indisputably authentic, the four piece group originally hails from Tallahassee, FL. Pool Kids, the band’s masterful self-titled album, fuses fan-favorite math and art rock familiarities with a tide of emotional and technical growth, engulfing the listener in a wave of impassioned indie rock angst. ‘Pool Kids’ is the first studio album to include writing contributions from new additions Nicolette Alvarez and Andy Anaya, seeing the band at their final, most kinetic form. Recorded in Seattle by producer Mike Vernon Davis, the latest LP is more crisp and polished than ever before, blending synth layers with post-hardcore guitar riffs and indie-pop textures with hot-tempered vocals. Lyrically, Pool Kids is about regeneration—from trauma, from heartbreak, and from culture. Vocalist Christine Goodwyne reaches into the murky depths of shared existence, pulling not only from her own struggles, but from the universality of emotion, unifying a genre-less fanbase and demolishing the wall between performer and listener.