The first few chords of Mary Timony’s Untame the Tiger, her first solo record in 15 years, feel like a warm hug from an old friend. After all, the singer-songwriter has been making music for three decades as part of the bands Helium, Autoclave, and Wild Flag, and, currently, Ex Hex. Then her voice, unmistakable after all these years, with her gravelly tone that always finds beauty in the matter-of-fact, sings, “Check the situation, is it cruel or is it kind?”
Though not immediately apparent, Untame the Tiger is a record about loss and grief. In 2021, Timony’s long-term relationship ended, and then both her parents got sick at the same time and eventually passed away. “They lived right down the street so it was really intense,” the singer-songwriter explains on a recent Zoom from her basement studio, her band set up visible in the background. “I didn’t really have a plan for what I was going to do, I just knew I wanted to get back into being creative.”
Although Timony hadn’t released an album under her own name since 2005’s Ex Hex, she’d been busy with her other bands and projects recently Hammered Hulls; but these songs were different. “The songs that were coming out of me didn’t sound like a band, they sounded like a solo record,” she recalls, “Then I started thinking about how I wanted to use acoustic instruments, and how I wanted to play with different drummers…I wanted the freedom of not working in a specific way.”