Miniature Tigers - Cruel Runnings (2014) Lossless

Brooklyn indie-pop band Miniature Tigers will release their fourth studio album, Cruel Runnings, on June 17th via YEBO Music. The follow-up to 2012′s Mia Pharaoh was produced by Chris Zane (The Walkmen, Passion Pit) during an extended Jamaican vacation, which helped “free them” creatively.

“There was just a different energy there, a different energy in such a relaxing environment,” adds bassist Brandon Lee in a press release. “Everything came very naturally. We had all decided, ‘Let’s just try to be as much of us as possible.’”

The press release also states that Cruel Runnings is “something halfway between nostalgia and the ecstatic now, an album that yearns for the recent past while staring open-hearted at what the present dares to bring. Songs about swimming pools remembered on sticky summer nights, lovers meeting at discotheques, streets where you used to live. Miniature Tigers have written a record that’s eminently relatable, passionate but not without a healthy sense of perspective.”

Already the band’s shared the bubbly “Swimming Pool Blues”, and today they unveil a second single in “Oblivious”. Tropical influences aside, the band continues in the same vein of ’80s-inspired synthpop. But even amidst the familiar hum of a vintage Casio and the same deeply forlorn new wave vocals, the band sounds freer, embracing earnestness at its most pure and a more realistic sense of romanticism. Pardon the cheesy pun, but it seems the band has truly found their groove.