Six long years since their last release, Sacred Paws are finally back with a new album and they’re determined to enjoy the ride. Jump Into Life is quintessential Paws, but there’s also something new here from vocalist/guitarist Ray Aggs, and vocalist/drummer Eilidh Rodgers: a slight shift in the ether, a progression with a purpose. First single ‘Another Day’ is a bubbly, bittersweet track about heartbreak and strength. But it’s also the song that best captures the growth that has happened during their lengthy hiatus.

‘The way it’s structured and the way the melody sort of grew out of the guitar part... it’s a lot more complex than the way we normally write,’ explains Aggs. ‘It was exciting to us because it sounds a bit different, a little bit more ambitious maybe. It has these cool riffs with the harmonies, just things we haven’t done that much of in the past. So yeah, we’re excited by it.’ 

Rodgers shares her bandmate’s enthusiasm about that song. ‘Weirdly, we were scheduled to record and it fell through, then we just kept working and we wrote that one after. We were really excited about it when we came out of the studio because it’s the newest one, but I think also it’s still my favourite.’

The album is the third full-length release from the duo, following 2019’s Run Around The Sun and their 2017 SAY Award-winning debut, Strike A Match, and the pair took a pragmatic approach to the writing process. ‘I think if some people have the origins of an idea, then they’d maybe work on it until it became something else,’ says Rodgers. ‘But if either of us is not particularly excited by something, then we tend to shelve it and come up with something fun.’ Aggs agrees, stressing that they don’t approach creating tracks in a regimented fashion. ‘We always write together, so that would be gruelling. We’d probably get a bit sick of each other! Or sick of the process. So it does need to be fun.’

Fun seems to be an overarching mantra for the duo these days and, like its predecessors, Jump Into Life takes complex emotions and delivers them in such a way that listeners could be forgiven for thinking all the songs on the album are happy: they’re not. What Sacred Paws do well is subvert norms and cliché in favour of nuance. ‘It’s a cathartic thing of taking a really huge emotion and going as extreme as you can with it,’ says Aggs. ‘With the melodies as well, we’re trying to make them quite grand. It’s funny because when you’re in the emotion and writing the song it feels like it’s never gonna be big enough to capture those feelings, but then you listen back and it’s two years later and you’re like “woah, I was really going through it!”’ 

As a band, think of Sacred Paws like taking photographs on an old-school camera as opposed to a phone: they create songs you want to physically hold, put in a box for safekeeping and bring special ones out when a given mood or feeling emerges. Ray Aggs and Eilidh Rodgers have honed the craft during their years away and planted a flag on a sound that is unmistakably their own.

Jump Into Life is released by Rock Action Records on Friday 28 March.