‘Mayfly Daydream’: Tiger Really talk us through their second album, track-by-track
When Tiger Really takes to the stage at their sold-out London show at The Grace, they are all smiling profusely.
It’s an important night for the emo-jazz band hailing from Vancouver, as for many of them, it’s the first time they’ve been in the British capital, let alone played for a sold-out audience in one of London’s trendiest spots. They soar through the show with all the appropriate gusto, which certainly gives the usual London bands playing in the venue a run for their money: Tiger Really are tight, theatrical, and personable with no place for the general London malaise on this Saturday night.
Before the show, Tiger Really frontperson, Lian Shao, takes the time to sit in the stuffy green room with me, backlit by reams of Jaffa cakes and untouched Red Bulls, and the topic of conversation is each and every song on the latest release, Mayfly Daydream.
It’s a surprisingly emotional moment for both of us; after all, I all but began my music journalism career when stumbling upon their show in Vancouver in the latter half of 2023. At that time, I’d write, somewhat cloddishly, that they had a “romantic and revitalising” take on the emo genre, and I brandished them with “sheer star-quality”, but Mayfly Daydream showcases more of an emotional maturity and resonance that persists long after the jeers of the crowd quiet.
In this vein, in a four-star review of the new record, Far Out observed, “Emo’s usual escapism and avoidance are swapped out, ultimately, for emotional authenticity and the catharsis of confession. Beyond the murky melancholy of malaise, this album matures into the real world.”
Before our deep dive into the album, I know only that the lyricism is inspired by “various cryptids and supernatural myths of American folklore and horror stories”, so it seems fitting that our chat touches on everything from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, fan-favourite creepypastas, the loose levity of ambiguity, and more.
‘Imprint’
Tiger Really open Mayfly Daydream with a soft, silky acoustic guitar that bleeds and builds eventually into a cathartic explosion, a great metaphor for the project at large: Big swings, soft hits, lots of emotion. Lian shows off his poetic genius with lines like “I’ve been burning in my sleep, you were there but differently,” and “You ripped infinity through all I’ve ever known”.
Lian says: “Imprint is about when you meet someone, and they leave a really big impression on you, to the point where it feels like they become a part of yourself and you carry that with you for the rest of your life. It’s about how certain people can change you really drastically and become part of who you are. It’s vaguely inspired by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I think that’s where a lot of the imagery came from.”
‘Some Kind of Necromancer’
On the album’s second track, a grieving guitar line swirls around extra layers of distortion, which comes to a head when Lian lets out a scream only those who have experienced real grief might recognise. The accompanying music video picks up on the simmering themes of death, decay, and pushing into the realm of the dead as a means to defy the logic of the living.
Lian relays, “‘Some Kind of Necromancer’ is a story about someone whose loved one died, and they try to do a summoning ritual to resurrect them. The music video is very much like that. Obviously, you can’t actually bring someone back, but it’s about how when you lose someone, you try to find things in your day-to-day life to cling on to that remind you of them, even though it’s never really quite the same.”
‘Blame’ (featuring idailedyournumber)
‘Blame’ is the only song on the album where Lian didn’t control the whole narrative; he shared the responsibility with Halifax’s electronic emo artist, idialedyournumber. As such, we only touched upon half of the narrative; the other half is left open, more overtly ambiguous for an entire project that encourages an entirely personal listening experience. The pair seeks to find common ground in a game of emotional smoke and mirrors.
Lian says: “‘Blame’ was more of a collaborative thing. For me, the song is about feeling a lot of guilt for losing something and being a bit self-deprecating. I wrote this one more for the music than the lyrics, because it was such a collaborative effort. To me, the song reads as one voice being really self-deprecating and the other voice saying, ‘Hey, this doesn’t really help anyone’. I like leaving the meaning a bit open so people can find their own interpretation.”
‘I Want to Run Away’
The Canadian artist poured much of his soul into this second full-length work, but no more, it seems, than in this unassuming middle track. When we touch upon the meanings, Lian lets the lyrics and that lonely guitar melody speak for themselves. “I want to let you go, I’m ripping at my face, I’m burning all my clothes, I feel so incomplete, some part I can’t replace,” he confesses wistfully on the emotional track.
Lian says, “‘I Want to Run Away’ is about…wanting to run away. There’s not much more to it than that—it’s about wanting to run away from your life and everything going on”.
‘Death Spiral’
In an album that seeks to understand and excavate the depressing despondency of being on your own, ‘Death Spiral’ is an important addition. We’ve worked past the lonely late-night musings and have reached an important fork in the road: the recognition that being on your own isn’t failure. You can take some time to stand apart, to fall back into a mind palace made by your own volition, and this can be, at the very least, a relief, or, even better, a celebration. Lian shows us that this viewpoint might need a little bit of the classic faking-it-till-you-make-it move.
Lian says, “‘Death Spiral’ is about trying to find comfort with being alone and convincing yourself that you’re okay on your own, that you’re not incomplete if you’re by yourself. That was the intention behind it, but I like leaving things open-ended if people hear something different.”
‘Mothman’
The mothman creepypasta (a legend born out of the internet) centres on a seven-foot, grey-furred humanoid moth-figure which acts as a harbringer of doom, but not for Lian; instead, the musician flipped the story on its head and wrote the mothman, along with a deliciously folky instrumental, as a lonely man, unable to cross the threshold of human connection, making for an inventive pastiche of the internet age.
Lian says, “‘Mothman’ is based on the urban legend. I imagined him as this lonely guy out in the woods who’s isolated and afraid to leave, kind of detached and avoidant. I wrote it when I was really socially isolated, just sitting in my room with an acoustic guitar, and it ended up being way folkier than I expected. The lyrics just kind of flowed out.”
‘Foal’
At the London show, the crowd is out of the loop, but in the green room, Lian lets me in on a secret: in an effort to juxtapose the crushing emotional weight of his usually acoustic performance of ‘Foal’, audiences in Canada usually sit down on the floor to begin pseudo-rowing a boat. I press on about how that came about, but the frontman is as uncertain as I am. Still, ‘Foal’ is cushioned by a beautiful, twinkly guitar melody, as Lian takes on a higher vocal and sings softly, “A man’s not worth giving up a soul, just know that I’ll always be a foal, still kicking and biting at my post”.
Lian says, “‘Foal’ is a song I wrote around the same time as ‘Mothman’, so they’re both a bit folky. It’s about not conforming to what people expect from you and choosing to live outside of that, even if it means being alone. It’s about resisting things even when it feels hopeless and staying true to your morals even when it isn’t convenient. Sometimes that can make you feel really alone.”
‘Mayflies’
Adult mayflies have a shockingly short lifespan, surviving for a few hours to a few days, with some females surviving for less than five minutes. For the album closer, Tiger Really takes this conceit and considers what it means to live on earth, with a finite amount of time. Can we do it all? Are we doomed to always be disappointed in what we have achieved? Tiger Really certainly shouldn’t be.
Lian says: “I was thinking about how if I only have so long to do everything I want to do, there are probably things I’ll never get to. It’s about how scary that feels… Realising that time is limited and wondering why you spend it being sad or not chasing what you really want. The song imagines that feeling at the end of your life, yearning for something you never quite managed to achieve.”
