Left Arm Tan’s seventh album, When Tigers Smoked, arrives after months away from music, following Daniel Hines’ recovery from five life-shaping surgeries in 2025.
The resulting thirteen-track record considers aging, mortality and relationships through performances captured live with producer Salim Nourallah. Recorded over six days with minimal overdubbing, it preserves the interaction between musicians and the imperfections of each take. Accompanying documentary Handmade Things widens that focus to people creating gardens, paintings and furniture, reflecting the community involvement that helped bring the band back after a live hiatus.
Discussing the release, the band explain:
“When Tigers Smoked is a Korean expression that roughly means ‘once upon a time,’ and the more distance I get from making this record, the more appropriate that title feels. In 2025, I went through five surgeries and basically stepped away from live music indefinitely. For a while, I genuinely didn’t know if I would ever play again. I was home recovering, alone with my thoughts in a way I hadn’t been in years, and something cracked open. Songs just started coming. I wrote more than 50. They were about mortality and resilience, getting older, being Gen X, taking inventory of your life and trying to understand what remains when some of the things you thought were permanent suddenly aren’t. I started sending them to Brian Lee, our singer and main songwriting collaborator, and as we worked through them together, we both felt something different was happening. Something we hadn’t quite reached before”
Stream When Tigers Smoked below:
