When one band ends, it’s often the catalyst for another to begin, and well-liked Brit tech-metal crew The Safety Fire were no exception.
From their ashes comes Good Tiger - an ambitious outfit that fuses metal, prog riffs and hardcore energy. Accomplished frontman Elliot Coleman, whose CV includes a spell in Tesseract, is at the helm.
“I toured with The Safety Fire guys while I was still in Tesseract, and said at the time that I’d be down for doing something fun on the side,” he says, “but I didn’t think they’d be looking at my name [for a new project].”
Since Good Tiger’s inception back in August, they’ve released a single, Snake Oil, and their crowd-funded debut album A Head Full Of Midnight (which reached double its target) has just been unleashed. As well as Snake Oil’s abrasive, sometimes discordant riffs and urgent vocal lines, the video is also a talking point; an arcade-style cartoon that sees the band reimagined as game avatars.
“That was more to do with our budget than concept,” laughs Elliot. “Animation was cool because we couldn’t get everyone in the same room [Elliot and drummer Alex Rudinger are US-based, while guitarists Derya Nagle and Joaquin Ardiles and bassist Morgan Sinclair live in the UK].”
Visuals aside, Elliot is also keen to stress that the single isn’t necessarily representative of everything the band can do.
“I don’t think you can form an opinion of the album based on Snake Oil alone,” he says. “It’s so eclectic; it’s rooted in rock and metal but there are clean vocals in there, some falsetto and some real powerful stuff. We don’t have a fanbase as yet, so we’ll listen to people’s opinions because we don’t just write songs for ourselves – it’s for the people listening, too.”
On tour in Europe with Periphery until the end of the year, Good Tiger are ready to pounce… and it’s going to be loud.
A Head Full Of Midnight is out now via Indigogo, iTunes and Spotify
