Q&A: Fetch Tiger Takes Center Stage with Debut Album ‘Walking to Camera’
INDIE POP DUO FETCH TIGER IS POISED FOR A BREAKOUT MOMENT WITH THEIR DEBUT ALBUM, WALKING TO CAMERA. This highly anticipated record chronicles a four-year journey of self-discovery and musical evolution. The album boasts a more direct, indie pop sound and explores themes of self-confidence and personal narratives. Tracks like "Fighter" and "Fun Guy" showcase a shift in songwriting, with Fetch Tiger embracing a more personal and relatable lyrical style.
Collaboration with indie folk favorites TOLEDO elevates the album's production, while positive reception for their singles fuels excitement for the full release. Walking to Camera delves into the complexities of relationships with tracks like "Our Love Was Fading," offering a relatable and emotionally resonant experience for listeners.
Fetch Tiger is ready to hit the road with a high-energy East Coast tour in support of the album. While excited to connect with fans, they also prioritize rest and reconnecting with the vibrant Brooklyn music scene. Walking to Camera promises to be a captivating journey for both the band and their audience
LUNA: Congratulations on your upcoming debut album, ‘Walking to Camera’! Can you tell us about the journey of creating this album and the themes that inspired its creation?
MONTALI: Thank you! It’s been a long time coming, starting the band four years ago and finally getting to the first full-length. In terms of process, we don’t usually have a set ‘writing’ period where it all happens at once, it’s more of finding pockets of inspiration in between everything else to write stuff. So I’d say we started writing it at the beginning of 2022, and recorded it that summer. There was one writing trip for a day upstate where we wrote one of our fav song Fighter - so maybe we should do that more.
Thematically, we kind of used this album to resolve this progression that started in our first EP ‘Preparation to Pretend’, which was all about imposter syndrome and that feeling that you’ll be ‘found out’; the 2nd EP ‘Flamethrower’ was more about that process of coming into your own, and now this album is all about realizing that feeling of self confidence and learning how to keep it.
LUNA: Your music has evolved from EPs to a full-length album. How has your creative process changed during the transition, and what new elements can listeners expect from ‘Walking to Camera’?
DAVIS: For “Walking to Camera,” we wanted to hone a more direct, indie pop sound that felt like a representation of both of us together as a duo versus a collection of somewhat unrelated vignettes. Although each song may have been written from only one of our POVs, we actually dove deeper than ever before into refining each other’s concepts and editing lyrics together, which helped to create a more joint expression on each track.
When we were actually ready to record the album, we still lived in two different countries on separate continents. So, I flew into New York from London for a two-week recording session that only worked because we had built an amazing and trusted working relationship and friendship with the boys from TOLEDO. They not only understood and elevated our vision, but they also helped us hone our sound away from our folk roots towards indie pop, by feeling comfortable enough to experiment with new instruments and synths, driving choruses and balanced layers of harmonies. We truly feel like this body of work is our most sophisticated - and confident - yet, due to our growth as songwriters and partnership and our trust in and collaboration with Dan and Jordan.
LUNA: This project showcases a shift in your storytelling approach, moving towards more direct and personal narratives. What motivated this shift, and how does it reflect your growth as artists?
MONTALI: I was the kid in 6th grade who was obsessed with the book Eragon and wanted to publish a medieval fantasy book when I was 16 like Christopher Paolini, so at least for me, I’ve always felt more comfortable exploring how I feel through characters and made up situations. And I still do. But after a couple EPs, I felt I was gravitating away from music with more ambiguous lyrics to stuff that I could actually tell what was going on. In the early days I was scared of writing something ‘cliche’ and so made up stories had more opportunity in my head to make lyrics ‘unique’ - over time I’ve learned it’s so much more than that. The simplest line could hit you in so many different ways depending on so many factors around it - the instrumentation, the timing, the melody, etc so I’m less worried about writing something never seen before because I know that once we demo the song out we can apply that emotion or uniqueness in another way.
LUNA: The album explores themes of self-confidence and personal introspection. Can you share how these themes influenced the songwriting and production process, especially in tracks like "Fighter" and "Fun Guy"?
MONTALI: So one of these songs - Fighter - is about a friend struggling with self confidence, and Fun Guy is more a personal experience. Fun Guy, is pretty overtly a story about a shy kid - in this case my own experience - at a high school dance who’s terrified of being called into a dance circle. It was in some ways the easiest song to write because I can still feel exactly how I felt in that situation - dying for it to be over soon, jealous I wasn’t the care-free confident popular kid, and worried I wasn’t ‘fun’ enough for the person I was with. Production wise, we wanted this one to feel opulent and overly dramatic to directly reflect how moments like that feel when you’re 16 years old - like the trajectory of your entire life is dependent on how you act in that moment…
Fighter is more the opposite. It’s about a friend who, to most people, and to us for a time, seems as if everything is perfect - always happy, glowing, the center of every friend group they’re in. But deep down once you just ask, you realize that’s not the case. So sonically we wanted this vibey, cool, sleek sound that almost masks the more melancholy lyrics about this struggle happening behind the scenes.
LUNA: Your singles from the album have garnered attention from various platforms and playlists. How does this reception influence your expectations and goals for the album's release?
DAVIS: It’s been genuinely so exciting and humbling to see the positive reception our singles have received across different platforms and playlists, from David Dean Burkhart to Spotify’s Fresh Finds Indie. Witnessing that connection with listeners is incredibly rewarding. While it's exciting to see the buzz building, we're trying to keep our expectations grounded. Our main goal with this album has always been to write songs that feel like the best representation of us as a band and hopefully see them resonate with as many people as possible. However, while the attention our singles have received certainly adds a bit of pressure, it also fuels our hope that the album as a whole will continue to resonate with our audience in a meaningful way once it’s out.
LUNA: "Our Love Was Fading" and "The Morning After Everything Broke" delve into the complexities of relationships and emotional turmoil. How do these tracks contribute to the overall narrative arc of the album?
MONTALI: In the last couple years, we’ve each been on our own mental health journeys. I feel like we each learned to look less at the external things going on that you think are making you feel a certain way, and realize that a lot comes down to how you feel about yourself. How you treat people, the health of your relationships, how you respond to things that happen to you - it’s all based on that intrinsic confidence and self-image. Both of these songs are based on a friend who got divorced at a young age - and watching that slow crumble (OLWF) and then the eventual break up (MAEB) - in a large part due to two people who loved each other but hadn’t fully figured themselves out, which eventually got the best of them.
LUNA: "Walking to Camera" features production by indie folk favorites TOLEDO. Can you discuss your collaboration with them and how it shaped the sound and direction of the album?
DAVIS: We started working with Dan and Jordan a few years back on some singles that were on our most recent EP and found the process to be so creatively inspiring and collaborative that we knew they’d be the perfect team to bring our vision and sound evolution to life. They get genuinely so excited about each demo, and we never feel like they have a dearth of ideas - it’s honestly like seeing a kid experiencing Disney World for the first time! We love hearing their initial ideas/directions, so actually recording them and bringing them to life with sounds we don’t have access to or guitar riffs we never thought of … it is what elevated the production of every single track and created a cohesive LP. Also being together with them in the studio for hours on end, we feel like we’ve formed a strong bond and relationship where we can as a group experiment no holds barred and then hone and refine back to a core soundscape.
LUNA: As you prepare for your East Coast headline tour in support of the album, what are you most looking forward to about performing live and connecting with your audience in a concert setting?
MONTALI: We caught the tour bug in late 2022 when we did our first out-of-hometown shows and have just been trying to do it ever since. Personally I’m excited to go down the East Coast and especially to the Carolinas because that’s where I went to college but haven't been back in years. One thing I like about our show is that it’s evolved to be higher energy now that we’re playing more of the new stuff. Our songs tend to get ‘rockier’ live than they are recording so it’s cool to see how our audience connects with that. We’ve been really working on adding new components - like more harmonies, a few electronic elements, and other stuff to keep things interesting and let the songs have their own life on stage.
LUNA: What intentions do you have for the upcoming months?
DAVIS: Sleeping…I’m only partially joking. We’ve been all systems go, pretty much over the last 6 months preparing for this album, recording new music, shooting a music video, making content, rehearsing, prepping for tour, designing new merch, all while having other full-time jobs. While we’re super excited for tour this Spring, trying to intentionally make time for ourselves and rest a bit (even though we know this industry never sleeps) is something we both are trying to do. But beyond that, we really want to go to more shows to get inspired by the creativity of other artists and deepen our connection in the Brooklyn music scene, which is rich with amazingly talented and supportive people.
