The Cat Empire

For over a decade now, The Cat Empire have carved themselves a unique place in the musical firmament, as a band with no guitars, with no easily definable style and no corresponding haircuts, but a band that can step onto any stage in the world and make the crowd move. More than move, in fact. Make the crowd lose themselves in frenzy.

In the early years, and after their first major release (The Cat Empire, 2003), the band found themselves, more often than not, being reduced to a series of slashes. The jazz / reggae / funk / latin / gypsy / hip hop tag grew longer and longer, but it was an apt description. The band would jump from one genre to the next, many times within a single song. It didn’t matter that the music couldn’t be defined, as long as people were dancing.

The question of what to call the music remains as difficult to answer today as it was ten years ago. The long line of slashes just doesn’t cut it anymore, and the music has grown out of its ‘multi-genre’ concept into something wilder, a spontaneous explosion of melody and rhythm that contains many flavours, but is undeniably a new country all of its own.

Always changing, always exploring the boundaries of their mutable and uncertain identity, the band seem to have reached some kind of event horizon on their latest album, STEAL THE LIGHT. But clearly, as always, this music is for dancing. The rhythm is front and centre, with a global beat that has fans all over the world dancing.

“In many ways this record is a return to our original aesthetic, a very simple thing; that the music is for dancing and feeling good; and that the beat of the record belongs to all nations. It should make people smile, make people dance. That’s all we want,” says trumpet player, Harry Angus.