Sacred Paws on new album Jump Into Life
SAY Award-winners Sacred Paws are back with their third album – they talk to us about friendship, songwriting and getting some distance from your work
Sacred Paws last brought us an album in 2019, and after some disbelief and a few failed attempts at addition we work out that that was six whole years ago. But sonically new record Jump Into Life feels like a natural successor to their previous work: those machine-gun drum rolls, candid vocals, and Afropop-inspired rhythms could only be the combined handiwork of guitarist Ray Aggs and drummer Eilidh Rodgers.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t a sonic progression though. The album takes a step towards more complex song structures – Aggs laughs that it’s the first time they’ve written choruses – and adds another layer of instrumentation to their on-record sound with a newfound string section. Aggs’ dad, who they play with in a fiddle band, even joins them on banjo for Another Day.
Aggs has been doing more work recently that examines folk music’s relationship with race – talks on decolonising folk music and monthly POC trad music sessions in Woodlands. They say they’ve always wanted to play fiddle on a Sacred Paws record, but didn’t feel ready til now. “The last few years I've been trying to reconcile my relationship to folk and the fiddle as an instrument, and bring it into the spaces where I feel more comfortable performing [...] queer punk and [in] scenes that I find empowering," they say. "I’m really trying to work on bringing those two worlds together.”
Jump Into Life is more vulnerable than its predecessors in every way, and it’s different too in the consistency of its mood and themes. Make no mistake: this is a heartbreak album. Though it deals in all stages of romantic loss, from the first glimpse of it on the horizon through to grief and finally absolution, it has captured the essence of a very specific moment in time.
The album has been finished for a year – Rodgers reveals they had to sit on her sofa listening to it before our call because they’d forgotten what it sounded like. Aggs, who does a lot of singing on this record and who lays claim to most of the feelings it exposes, cheerily admits it’s hard to connect to it now: “Personally, I'm not in that place anymore so it's kind of weird to listen back and be like, ‘Oh wow, they were really going through it.’”
At the same time Aggs and Rodgers are having to get back into the shoes of the people who wrote their award-winning debut Strike a Match in 2017. It’s for the Scottish Music Industry Association, who have invited a series of acts to perform a previously nominated Scottish Album of the Year contender live and in full at the Tolbooth in Stirling.
Interestingly for both Aggs and Rodgers, there’s a sense that time has interposed a sort of third party author – that these songs are a message from elsewhere. For Aggs, every song and album is like a postcard from the past. For Rodgers, there’s a parallel with the obsessive style of listening you can only do when your access to music is finite. “It's similar to the way that you related to music when you were younger," she says. "Before Spotify you just had a few CDs. You knew them inside out and when you hear those albums back now you’re like: that reminds me of that very specific time.”
Looking back they can also see how much their approach to songwriting has evolved. Now when they write they conceive of a track as a whole, incorporating choruses and other parts from the get-go. In the early days they weren’t looking to write an album, or even a song – they were just hanging out. “We were really excitable," Rodgers says, "Ray would just play anything on guitar and I’d be like, ‘Wow, that's amazing!!’ And then I’d be like, [Rodgers air drums] jagajugajuag tcchh.”
You can tell they’re still excited by each other – listening back, the recording of our call is littered with laughter and exclamation. That seed of friendship is central to their sound, Sacred Paws just the inevitable consequence of their creative energies meeting. “We just will always make the music that we make,” Rodgers explains. “It's not a conscious decision. It's just our personalities in a room together, and what that brings out."
Aggs agrees: “There's certain friends that you hang out with, and there's certain things that you'll talk about, and there's a certain way that you'll talk to them – I feel like that's sort of what happens when we write songs together. It's hard to describe, but it's just always gonna be the same, because it's us, and that's what's making it happen."
Jump Into Life is released on 28 Mar via Rock Action
Sacred Paws play Mono, Glasgow, 30 Mar; The Mash House, Edinburgh, 18 Apr; the date for their rescheduled Strike a Match show at Tolbooth, Stirling is TBC