“On every record, I’m looking for a contrast,” Tigercub’s Jamie Stephen Hall tells Apple Music. “I think counterpoint is something that is a real driving force in great art. I wanted to have whisper-quietly-by-candlelight vocals against the most gained-out guitars we could get. I think that the way we express loud-quiet-loud is becoming a part of our identity.” The UK rock trio’s third LP—and first for Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard’s Loosegroove Records imprint—The Perfume of Decay makes good on those aims, drawing often staggering lines between its soft, nocturnal moments and those towering, aforementioned guitars. Much of it’s inspired by Deftones and The Cure, the sea (“such a powerful force in the world, but it can be so gentle”) and nights that Hall’s spent awake, anxious. “I realized nighttime and being in bed is this really weird space that you’re in because, on the one hand, it’s really cozy and it’s somewhere that you’re safe, but also you’re trapped there,” he says. “I started to try and process how that works a little bit more in my head. And I just started writing songs that felt like they had this slightly whimsical but dreamy feel.” Here, Hall walks us through some of them. “Dirge” “There’s something about our bass player Jimmy’s bass tone. When you’re in a room with a bass amp that’s really loud, the waves that it’s kicking out are so physical and powerful—that felt like the right way to open the record, with a powerful sense of dread. When you put the record on, I wanted it to sound like fucking meteors coming towards Earth, like there’s just something huge about to fucking happen.” “The Perfume of Decay” “There’s a film called Memoria with Tilda Swinton, which is about her hearing this sound in her head that no one else can. And in that film, there’s this phrase, ‘the perfume of decay’—and as soon as I heard it, I just wrote it down. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. It follows on with what I like about creating albums and creating songs: It’s oxymoronic, two opposing forces put together.” “Play My Favourite Song” “When I’m alone, and I’m not distracted, when I don’t have my phone, when I don’t have anything to pacify myself—that’s when the real thoughts start to come into my head. The verse is, ‘Black tides arise above me/White lies define me ugly.’ It’s feeling like people are talking about you, like people are getting the wrong idea of you. I’m just marinating in stress, worrying—but the flipside to it is the chorus, where it’s just like, ‘Well, fuck all of that. Music makes all of that better.’ I can try and make it seem more complicated than it is, but sometimes the simple things just work. It’s an ode to music.” “Swoon” “Dissonance, for me, is what makes things really, really addictive to listen to. With ‘Swoon,’ I interpolated the chords from ‘The Way I Am’ by Eminem and then put the melody over it, and then a huge, ginormous riff in the middle of it. And what I like about it is the structure of it is quite strange. It doesn’t necessarily follow your typical song structure. It’s verse, weird guitar bit, verse, riff, chorus, a bit of the verse, and then it does what it wants. It’s a bit unruly. It felt like a bit of a statement piece as we were putting it together.” “We’re a Long Time Gone” “With production tricks and sound design and sonics, I think sometimes you can get away from what is actually a good or a shit song through decorating it. When you strip something back, I think the song just has to be great for it to survive. The song has to do more heavy lifting on its own.” “It Hurts When You’re Around” I wanted to give nothing away, that an absolutely enormously loud bit is coming. It’s almost like a fucking bus drives through your window. But the start of the song has this nocturnal, toy-box feel. I was thinking of how your mind just fills with thoughts and ideas when it’s got nothing left to distract it. And just before you’re about to go off into this sleep, when you’re in that in-between phase.” “Help Me I’m Dreaming” “I look at albums almost like films, with different acts. And I think what I wanted was ‘Shadowgraph’ to be this epic last scene in the film. And then ‘Help Me I’m Dreaming’ is the credits roll. It’s always like we’ve been out at sea this whole time, and we’ve finally reached shore. It’s exit music, and I feel it just sends it back off into space really nicely.”