I wore a dead man’s leather jacket to my senior prom. Four dollars at an estate sale and it still smelled faintly of pipe tobacco and I loved it more than any boy in that fucking gymnasium. My town ran on pastel dresses and future farm wives, and I showed up looking like I’d been dropped off by a touring band. Nobody asked me to dance, which I filed under their loss. I spent years thinking the wrongness was a defect I’d grow out of. Then I moved to a city and walked into a bar wearing the same attitude, and a room full of strangers decided I was the most interesting thing in it. Turns out it was the whole appeal. CELLO understands this on a molecular level, because ‘Like A Tiger’ is alien-girl swagger turned into a disco strut, and I’ve been playing it loud enough to bother my neighbors.
‘Like A Tiger’ is her third single ahead of her debut album ‘Kung Fu Disco,’ and it moves the way the title promises. Driving funk guitars ride a heavy disco beat built for slow prowling, and the groove takes its sweet-ass time getting anywhere, which is honestly the sexiest thing about it. Picture Robyn’s blue-lit melancholy crossed with Marc Bolan’s glam swagger. Some vintage Madonna lives in her attitude too, that specific self-possession of a woman who knows the party will come to her.
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Otherness is the subject and CELLO says it straight. “I wanted it to feel like breaking free,” she explains, and freedom is the right word because the whole track feels like shedding something you were told to keep on. “The song is about feeling like an alien,” she goes on, “like you don’t belong and maybe you’re not even from here.” Every girl who grew up strange in a place that punished strange knows that suspicion – the quiet theory that you were left here by mistake. CELLO takes the theory and turns it into a fucking flex. Loving the strangeness is the whole point, treating what makes you unplaceable as the hottest thing about you instead of the thing you play down at parties.
Then the tiger. “And of course, there’s the tiger,” she adds, “we all want to be like a tiger don’t we?” Hell yes we do. A tiger walks into any territory she wants and the room adjusts. That’s what the song hands you, the slow-hipped certainty of moving through a party knowing every set of eyes tracks you across the floor and letting them look. Put this on while getting dressed for a night you plan to win and watch what it does to your posture.
Here’s what separates her from every other indie girl with a disco beat. CELLO trained as a classical cellist before she ever wrote a pop song and that discipline shows up in the restraint. She understands tension the way only someone with conservatory scars can – when to hold a phrase back and when to let it loose – and the payoff feels earned because of it. The weirdness has structure underneath it and that shit is what makes it dangerous rather than quirky.
She goes cosmic with it too, writing that “the universe is infinite and we are just specs of dust amongst the stars, but somehow, through it all, we are connected.” Big talk for a damn disco track and she pulls it off, because the loneliness of being different and the comfort of knowing the other alien girls are out there moving to the same beat can live in one song. I’ve locked eyes across a dancefloor and clocked one of my people instantly. Wrong in all the same ways. This one’s for us.
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CELLO is a Brighton artist who earned her nickname the honest way, studying cello at the Junior Royal College of Music in London before deciding the classical world was too small a cage for her. She grew up raiding her parents’ vinyl, Bowie and Eurythmics with plenty of heavy rock in the stacks, and she runs the dramatic flair of Stevie Nicks and Lady Gaga through the sharp edges of Wire and Blondie. While touring internationally as a professional cellist she met her producer and co-writer JB on the last train out of London one night. He turned out to be a former EMIM Music Studios engineer with Guru’s ‘Jazzmatazz’ and Primal Scream on his résumé. Heavy Stereo and The House of Love are on there too, and so is Merz. When lockdown parked her touring life she started writing songs of her own, and together they built ‘Kung Fu Disco,’ due in autumn 2026 on Barracuda Recordings and recorded at The Metway, the studio The Levellers call home. The album promises the same rule-breaking streak she’s been flashing single by single, and ‘Like A Tiger’ makes a hell of a case for it.
That jacket still hangs in my closet, by the way. I wore it out last Friday over a slip dress it has no business matching and pulled more attention than everything else I own combined. Somewhere back home the pastel girls are planning school pickups and I’m genuinely happy for them. I got the better deal. CELLO wrote one for everyone who figured out the thing that made them wrong for one room makes them fucking unforgettable in the right one, and she put a beat under it built for hunting. I plan to use it.
