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Maja Linn (guitar, vocals), Sara Frendin (bass) and Astrid Carsbring (drums), three very young girls from the lovely city of Stockholm, formed Heavy Tiger in 2010. Maja Linn explains: “It all really was the outcome of my frustration in my former band, due to the other band members' lack of dedication. I quit that band three years ago with a clear vision in my head and determined to put together a killer act with thorough ambitions. I started to search and found the best! Sara and Astrid are great musicians and we get along very well.” Heavy Tigers' first record was a 7" EP entitled »Talk Of The Town« for a tiny Spanish label. High Roller Records is now proud to release the band's first album. It contains nine songs all in all, from the groovy hard rock anthem “Chinatown” (not a Thin Lizzy cover) to the instantly accessible “Saigon Kiss”, which is bound to become a big underground hit number (possessing a little punk edge). “Thank you very much! Glad you like them,” Maja says. “We are pretty satisfied with our bunch of songs ourselves. About possible punk influences, isn't it bound to shine through when you're raised on The Clash, he he? For me, it has never been any problem with different influences. I listen to good bands and good music, may it be the New York Dolls, 1960's girl groups, KISS or Bob Dylan. What genre are the New York Dolls anyway? Punk or Glam? Both or neither? I don't need to know. It's just an awesome band.” With only one 7" single and the album under their belts, Heavy Tiger are already quite big in Spain (they did an entire tour there) and Finland (where they have a very healthy fan base). However, guitarist/vocalist Maja Linn thinks there's still plenty of room for improvement when it comes to playing their hometown Stockholm: “It's not much of a healthy climate for rock 'n' roll here as one would like to think. In Finland it's another story. We've heard good things about Germany too, as well as Spain. Finland is great for a good rock 'n' roll band. People there are nice and have always made us feel very welcome. We have played there a lot. It all took a spin when we got the chance to open for The Flaming Sideburns at their comeback show at the legendary venue Tavastia in Helsinki. Since then we've had a booking agent there.” The band's debut album was produced by Fred Estby at Gutterview studios. Heavy Tiger recorded the album and then went looking for a label: “We pretty soon talked to Robert Pehrsson, who was just about to release his album on High Roller. He told us about these folks here who had done a great job for him and his upcoming record. We contacted High Roller and got positive response instantly. Actually, we recorded the album in a different studio initially, but after mixing we found out that we were not satisfied with it at all. We wanted a whole different sound. So we wrote some new songs, rewrote some of the old ones and recorded everything all over again from scratch at Gutterview Recorders with Fred Estby, who did an excellent job. And he's also an awesome guy! We made the album without anyone backing us up, because we didn't have the patience to wait. I had this fixed idea of nine songs for the album, no less, no more. A couple of songs didn't make it to the final record, and a couple of good songs more recently finished, not yet recorded, have been saved for the next record. Actually, it's quite a self-regulating process, this songwriting thing. If you come up with an idea not good enough, then it's dropped at a very early stage. You have to feel it in the gut to bother going on with it, otherwise there's no point ...” Somebody once described Heavy Tiger's music as "Suzi Quatro meeting Girlschool". Well, apart from Girlschool, you also have further all-female N.W.O.B.H.M. acts such as Rock Goddess, Canis Major or Siege as good reference points. And The Runaways from the States of course: “We get to hear that a lot, about the Runaways in particular. Cool chicks, all of them!” Matthias Mader |