Tigermilk

Tigermilk grew out of the Music Business course at Stow College, which released one record a year on its label Electric Honey. Murdoch and David's demos had been picked up by the course. They assembled a band, and the full ensemble had not played together before they got into the studio. Murdoch said many of the supporting parts took shape as they recorded, and that after the sessions they were a group. Nine of the ten songs were recorded live in three days at CaVa Studios, followed by two days of mixing. Pitchfork's Marc Hogan wrote that Gregor Reid was the engineer, and that Murdoch insisted on recording his acoustic guitar and a scratch vocal first, leaving the rest of the group to catch up with his racing tempos.

The exception is Electronic Renaissance. It began as a demo Murdoch made at Beatbox using Cubase, and it was mastered from a cassette he had made of the song being played on local radio, which explains its lo-fi sound. Its place on the album was disputed at first. All the songs were written by Murdoch between 1993 and 1996 and first performed solo on the Glasgow open mic circuit. The cover photograph was taken by Murdoch and shows his then-girlfriend Joanne Kenney.

Release and reception

Electric Honey issued the album in mid-1996, limited to 1,000 copies, which sold out in months. The Scottish magazine The List gave it a glowing review, the band's first national press, and the BBC presenters John Peel and Mark Radcliffe championed it. Radcliffe booked them for a radio session in July 1996. Colburn recalled that then record companies and fans started calling. Jeepster reissued the album in 1999, by which time copies of the original were selling for $600. It has sold more than 124,000 copies.

Hogan called it an immaculate oddball of a debut album and described the sound as lush and loose, with songs like fast, detailed short stories. The author Dave Thompson called it a gentle masterpiece in debt to Nick Drake. Pitchfork put The State I Am In at number 17 on its list of the top 200 tracks of the 1990s.