The song opens on a funk guitar riff that would not embarrass Nile Rodgers on a particularly twitchy afternoon, before settling into a heavy disco pulse that simultaneously recalls the Studio 54 delirium of the late seventies and the caustic chic of early Blondie \u2014 not the Blondie of “Heart of Glass,” all glacial cool, but the Blondie of “Dreaming,” raw and slightly dangerous. The rhythm section drives everything forward with the purposeful momentum of a night bus you’ve decided to board regardless of where it ends up.<\/p>
Over this, Cello constructs a vocal performance that rewards repeated listening. She does not oversell. Where lesser pop artists would vault skyward into melismatic gymnastics, she holds her position, allowing the emotion to accumulate rather than burst. The comparisons to Robyn are, for once, not mere lazy shorthand \u2014 both artists share that particular Nordic-adjacent quality of singing about transcendence while sounding completely grounded in their own bodies. The hint of Bolan is there too, a certain glam assurance, a willingness to make statements that are almost absurd but delivered with such conviction that absurdity dissolves entirely. And yes, there is Madonna \u2014 the early, hungry Madonna of “Holiday,” not the later imperial one \u2014 a pop intelligence operating beneath the surface noise, making structural choices that feel instinctive but are almost certainly meticulous.<\/p>
The lyrical territory is otherness. Alienation. The peculiar grace of not quite belonging anywhere. “The song is about feeling like an alien, like you don’t belong, and maybe you’re not even from here,” Cello has said of the track, and the song earns that ambition without straining for it. This is not the tiresome adolescent alienation of someone who simply wants to be noticed as different. It is the more mature, more interesting discovery that strangeness is not a wound to be healed but a vantage point to be claimed. The universe is vast and indifferent, the lyric suggests, and that indifference is actually rather liberating if you let it be.<\/p> The music video reinforces this reading with considerable visual intelligence. Shot in a palette that suggests both science fiction and seventies glam \u2014 the world Cello inhabits feels simultaneously retro and entirely its own \u2014 it presents an artist who understands that the image must do more than illustrate the song. It must extend it. And here it does. The tiger of the title is not merely mascot or metaphor; it becomes a genuine mythological proposition: power that is beautiful precisely because it is feral, grace that derives from complete unselfconsciousness.<\/span><\/p> Cello’s backstory gives all of this a pleasing biographical resonance. A classically trained cellist who studied at the Junior Royal College of Music before discovering post-punk and art-pop, she is the kind of musician who has genuinely earned her references rather than merely curating them. Her collaborator JB \u2014 whose production credits span from Guru’s *Jazzmatazz* to Primal Scream \u2014 brings a studio sensibility that is restless without being overcrowded. The production on “Like A Tiger” is remarkably disciplined; every element is audible, every choice purposeful. Recorded at The Metway in Brighton, home famously to The Levellers, it has that quality of being made by people who knew exactly what they wanted the room to sound like.<\/span><\/p> Whether *Kung Fu Disco*, due this autumn on Barracuda Recordings, will sustain this quality across an entire album remains to be heard. A debut album is a promise, and Cello has now made that promise three times in single form, each time more emphatically than the last. “Like A Tiger” is the most emphatic of all \u2014 a song that does not ask your permission, does not wait to see whether you approve, and is entirely, magnificently correct to proceed on that basis. We all want to be like a tiger, don’t we? Listening to this, the aspiration no longer sounds like a platitude. It sounds like a reasonable Tuesday evening plan.<\/span><\/p> *Cello’s debut album ‘Kung Fu Disco’ is due for release in autumn 2026 on Barracuda Recordings.*<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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