‘Strike A Match’, the band’s urgent and infectious first offering, was released on Mogwai’s Rock Action label in 2017 and won the prestigious Scottish Album of the Year Award that same year. That success was quickly capitalised on with another full-length effort, the band’s second LP ‘Run Around The Sun’, which was released in 2019. More than five years have now passed since that release, and while Sacred Paws’ absence wasn’t necessarily deliberate it was certainly intentional – Ray and Eilidh deciding that rather than force the work, they would take as long as they felt they needed to produce the album they knew they
were capable of.
‘Jump Into Life’, the lush and layered new album is proof that such a journey was both necessary and significant. Formed of eleven new songs, it takes the roots of the Sacred Paws project and breathes fresh life into it, blossoming into something both abundant and more colourful than has come before; a gentle skewing of their signature sound that feels wildly thrilling.
Having been so patient for so long, Ray and Eilidh found form in that sudden lightning-bolt of inspiration and brought together the songs that would make up ‘Jump Into Life’ with a wide-eyed, thrilling sense of abandon. Such honesty is reflected in the finished record, the band embracing a more open-hearted sincerity in the songs rather than hiding such sentiments behind their more characteristic riffs and rhythms.
Personal catharsis through music is nothing new, but Sacred Paws attack their own demons with a gutsy, characterful heft across ‘Jump Into Life’. It’s still every bit as infectious and vital as what’s come before but it funnels those moments of heady release through feelings of heartbreak, healing and renewal. “It’s definitely a Sacred Paws record but it feels a bit older and wiser,” the pair explain of their new chapter.
“We took a few years working on the songwriting and pushed ourselves creatively. We wrote a lot in that time, but we made sure every song had something that we fell in love with.”
With their emblematic, signature sense of fervour, Sacred Paws continue to hurtle forward, jumping into life, embracing that forward motion that stops lingering in the shadows of life’s messiness. Full of endearing energy, and buoyed by new sounds, textures, and character, ‘Jump Into Life’ is both a call-back and an evolution; unafraid to reveal its warm and heavy beating heart, even with all the anxiety such a thing entails.