Oko Tygra - swing and sway like 80's icons on the track "Ghosts"

Oko Tygra on the cool airy track Ghosts feels like a time machine with the sway of bands like the Cure, The Smiths and Joy Division all diced up and blended together. Based out of Denver, Colorado the band came to be at the hands of Joshua Novak after suffering an accident that left him with a life threatening head injury. That life changing critical moment became the genesis of the band.

"I thought we needed to approach this seriously from the beginning and I didn’t want to make the same mistakes again," says Novak.

"The band is deeply inspired by the dreamy New Wave and Goth acts of the 80’s. What we do isn’t burlesque, we aren’t a cover band. We always say that we’ve picked up where the 80’s left off.“ 

Their debut album is called "Assistoma" - 

-
Robb Donker

PRESS NOTES:

The ten tracks on Assistoma (Grey Market Records) distort Novak’s early lyrical distress and candor resulting in a deeper connection to the parts left unexplained. The sonically dense songs are a study on the almost fetishistic joys of being alone, while being filtered through the blissed out perspective of a queer protagonist. "I was in a place in life where I felt a bit lost,” says Novak. "This was amplified by the ending of a toxic romantic situation I was in at the time. I didn’t feel like exploring the typical themes of love and loss. I wanted to see what it meant to be alone and almost turned on by that - which I was - but what I felt didn’t have a name, so I made up “assistoma” to describe it. I think I wanted people to sort of scratch their heads a little. We all know what it’s like to be alone and how it feels to be overjoyed, but I wanted to write something that put those two feelings in the same room together and make it feel like a love song, even though it’s not.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) these feelings of “assistoma,” Novak touches on family as a source of inspiration for the band. "Like a lot of people, we all have complicated relationships with our families, particularly our fathers. In our band there has been death of parents, intense political and religious disagreements, abandonment etc. So, when writing about them, we wanted to focus more on the feeling and not the straight-up biography. We wanted people to wonder, is it about God or fathers? About romantic love or parental love? Is it about silence or integrity?”  

OKO TYGRA also delves into bigger themes like faith, war, obsession - creating moods around these ideas that are a bit more surreal or abstract. "We are intrigued about the open-endedness of these bigger questions and wanted to capture a little bit of that by not focusing too intently on the answers, which no one has. Our music brings these things into focus and puts us in control of the outcome. It’s as if we look forward to the future by acknowledging the past."