Brighton’s finest announce themselves to a much bigger room on a raw, relentless fourth album

Words by Felix Bartlett | April 09, 2026

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There’s a moment early in Nets to Catch the Wind where you realise Tigercub aren’t playing for the back of the room anymore. They’re playing for the car park outside. Ten years after their debut, Brighton’s finest trio have written an album that sounds like a band fully aware of their own ceiling and determined to blow straight through it.

Jamie Hall told us earlier this year that he’d gone back to the bones of late 90s rock during the writing process: Muse, Audioslave, Ash, Radiohead at their most bruised and beautiful. Not to lift from them, but to understand why they worked. What he took from that wasn’t a sound, it was a principle: strip it back, play it raw, make it impossible to ignore. On album four, produced by Tom Dalgety, that principle has landed.

Hall is a frontman who wears his emotional state on his sleeve and doesn’t apologise for it. Opener Silver Smile announces the record with drums you feel in your ribs before the riff even arrives. Stuck In The Melancholy, one of the album’s real gut-punches, channels the particular misery of being stuck between where you were and where you’re going, with Hall’s vocals taking on a restless, almost desperate quality. Head Over Heels shifts the mood, quieter and more exposed, a song that sounds like someone gathering themselves off the floor and deciding, reluctantly, to keep going.

The album isn’t without its weirder corners. Golden Sands is a twelve-second piano breath, recorded on the same instrument Oasis used for Don’t Look Back In Anger, as Jamie casually dropped in our chat, which does exactly what a brief interlude should: interrupts the relentlessness just long enough to make you miss it. Cut the Eyes Out of the Photographs, featuring Clutch’s Neil Fallon on spoken word, is a delicate balance of genuinely strange and genuinely great, the kind of left-field swing that only works because the band have earned enough trust by that point for you to follow them anywhere.

The record closes on Sadness, Don’t You Worry, quieter and more generous than anything that precedes it. A song that offers something close to comfort without being saccharine about it. It’s the right ending.

Tigercub have always had the riffs. What Nets to Catch the Wind proves is that they now have the songs to match. After selling out KOKO last month for the launch show, the next size up feels inevitable. Stone Gossard spotted something worth backing. He wasn’t wrong.

Verdict: 💀💀💀💀

For fans of: Royal Blood, Queens of the Stone Age, Highly Suspect

Nets to Catch the Wind is out April 10 via Loosegroove Records