If it seems like it’s been a long time since we last heard from Sacred Paws, that may be because it feels like we’re now living in another time from when the Scottish duo last released a record. (Although, unfortunately, there are some alarming similarities). When the band’s sophomore album, Run Around the Sun, came out in May 2019, we were still existing in a pre-pandemic age that seems somewhat hard to fathom these days. Like the band’s debut, Strike a Match, which won the 2017 Scottish Album of the Year Award, it was a sunny mix of buoyant melodies, Afro-inflected guitar nodes, and propulsive rhythms that was hard not to love.

On Jump Into Life, their new album released last week by Merge Records here in the States and on Mogwai’s Rock Action label in the UK, Ray Aggs (guitar and vocals) and Eilidh (pronounced “aye lee”) Rodgers (drums and vocals) sound slightly world-weary, but no less exuberant. Also adding new elements like strings and banjo (played by Aggs’ father), they’ve expanded upon the musical vocabulary of their first two records while retaining everything that made them so wonderful.

I caught up with the pair via Zoom a few days before the record’s release to discuss how it came to fruition.

Any particular reason for such a long gap between records?

Eilidh Rodgers: COVID kind of derailed everything. Initially, we did try to write in our apartments, but we were kind of a bit self-conscious about the noise. It was a bit of a downer, so we just kind of waited.

Ray Aggs: We didn’t really think about it. We weren’t panicking that it’d been ages since we released anything. We were just trying to write something that we really liked, enjoy the process, and not rush it. Now we are realizing it’s been five years.

The pandemic was not a productive time for us. We really love playing live, so to write an album without knowing when you’re going to be able to do that again was a really weird time. So that did really slow us down, but also we never wanted to rush it. It just took as long as it took.

ER: We did record it ages ago, which is another reason it seems longer. I think we went into the studio in 2023, then it just took forever to finish it and get it out. So it’s been a process.

Did you go to Mogwai’s studio again?

ER: Yeah, it’s nice because there’s a window and there’s no kind of time constraint, so you can enjoy the process of writing. And it sounds good.

This being your first post-pandemic record, is the title, Jump Into Life, a reference to that?

RA: Well, all of our album titles have calls to action, so that wasn’t really intentional. And it was nice that we ended up having a song that also had that feeling about it. It’s something we do a lot when we write songs. It’s like we’re trying to cheer ourselves up. We’re trying to provide some catharsis and a bit of motivation to enjoy life, like find some energy, some hope, and some kind of forward motion, despite a lot of the heavier emotions and sadness on the record. And it kind of fits with Strike a Match and Run Around the Sun.

People tend to describe your music as being fairly sunny and you were just talking about trying to cheer yourself up. When I think of Glasgow, someone like The Twilight Sad seems more apt. You even have a song on the album called “Winter,” so is it like picking yourself out of the doldrums of the grey of Glasgow?

ER: Yeah, it’s the opposite approach of a lot of bands. We’re always trying to find some light at the end of the tunnel.

RA: For me, that’s sort of the point of music. You can either indulge the sadness—and that’s really cathartic—or you can try to transcend it to find some joy. We have to go through the sadness. That’s why a lot of our lyrics are kind of sad, but we have upbeat melodies.

I feel like that’s what other people’s music does for me. It keeps me going. Music is the one thing that can get me through the day when I really don’t want to keep going. If there’s music playing, I’m going to be alright. So I hope that our music can do that for other people. It definitely does it for me. Just playing our songs makes me feel pretty good.

Still, in comparison to the other two records, this one sounds a little more downcast. The opening track’s violins sound a bit morose. Were you in a more melancholy mindset in general for this record?

RA: Yeah, I was going through a breakup, so there’s a lot about heartbreak, but also experiencing falling in love and the feelings of the beginnings and ends of relationships. It was an emotionally turbulent time for me, so there are some heavier emotions. Those kinds of emotions are on our other records, as well, but maybe they come through sonically a bit more on this one. We’ve never had strings before, and having them on a track does have kind of an emotional weight to it. We were really excited to have a different sound, particularly to open it, but it does sound very somber. But then the drums come in and it’s like, oh, it’s us again.

Obviously, you brought in other people to do the strings and whatnot, but do you ever feel limited as a two-piece?

RA: We’ve come to think of us live as a really different thing from us on record.

ER: In an ideal world, it’d be great to get the session people in to do a gig. That would be really special. But we do try to fill the gaps by having our friends contribute when we play live.

RA: Yeah, we do play as a four-piece live. We have two guitars, bass, and drums. I feel like that sounds pretty big, and we play with a lot of energy. I hope that it doesn’t feel like it’s lacking anything. I think that the songs take on a different character, and we become more of a normal guitar band. In an ideal world, we would have three guitars, a horn section, a string section, and my dad on the banjo, but we don’t have tons of money. It’s sad, but it is a real factor that holds us back from having the super big band of our dreams.

Were you starting from scratch when you went into the studio?

ER: There are a couple of tracks on the album, “Slowly Slowly” and “Simple Feeling,” that we’d been playing live for awhile.

RA: But we did have a spurt of writing, where we were writing stuff that we actually liked. And we had some concentrated time in Mogwai’s practice space just writing. That was probably when it properly became an album.

Given the amount of time, did you end up with a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor?

ER: We always kind of have 10 songs on an album. So when we are writing, it’s like we need 10 songs, and when we get to 10, we stop. So it’s quite radical to have 11 songs on the album.

RA: We were really enjoying everything that we were writing, and I don’t think we really scrapped anything from the recording sessions. We did have some new songs before that, but we didn’t love them. We hadn’t been motivated to make a record because we weren’t in love with those songs. I’m really glad that we waited, because if it was up to me, we might have released those songs. We had an argument.

ER: It wasn’t an argument, but I was like, this is not an album.

RA: Yeah, I was just like, it’s fine, which is not how you should ever feel about something you’ve made. You’ve got to be excited about it or there’s no point doing it.

Being just the two of you, do you both have veto power?

ER: We usually agree.

RA: Eilidh has final quality control. I mean, I think everything that I make is amazing for about a day. Then I show Eilidh and she says, “Yes, it is the best song ever,” or “No, it’s not.”

I was noticing listening to the new one, and compared to Around the Sun, it seemed like you were singing more in unison this time. When you’re singing different things, is that representative of two different points of view, and if that’s the case, were you more of the same mindset for these songs?

RA: I really like it when we sing different things because it feels it’s like a conversation. But we don’t really discuss what we’re singing about. We’re just both thinking about different things.

But I guess on this record, I did end up singing a lot and writing a lot of the singing parts, and then Eilidh would do harmonies. I guess we were writing songs that were more traditionally structured, like they have verses and choruses. We were trying to do these big chorus melodies, which is not something we really did on the last two records. So that lends itself to a more traditional style of doing things, which is why that happened. I also feel like it’s because I was having a lot of emotions and I needed to get them out. I’m sorry that I took up all the emotional space.

ER: No, I enjoyed it.

People always bring up African influences in your music, so I was wondering if there was somewhere that came from specifically.

ER: We both love a lot of West African pop music, but that’s kind of just naturally how Ray plays, isn’t it?

RA: When I first learned guitar and I started Trash Kit, people used to say that my guitar playing reminded them of Highlife or Zimbabwean music, but I actually had never really listened to those things, apart from like Paul Simon. I’d never listened to any African music, so I didn’t really know what they were talking about. So I then got into African music, and was like, “Oh, yes, this is the best music ever!” It just makes sense to me, like that’s the best way to play the guitar.

On this album, we tried to write more pop songs, and I’ve been trying to think less about the guitar as a sort of way to play all these riffs. But I hope that those influences still come through. It’s just naturally what comes out when I pick up the guitar. I don’t think that that’s going to change as it’s never been a conscious thing.

Doing some research in preparation for talking to you, I Googled “Sacred Paws.” There’s apparently a pet crematory in North Carolina with the same name. Where did you get the name from?

ER: We didn’t realize that, actually, but someone mentioned that after we started the band. We were coming up with the band name and didn’t feel like it was important or that it had to be serious. It was kind of a joke, really. But also we love cats.

RA: I think it was a joke. It’s cute and silly, but also the word “sacred” is not cute and silly. It’s sort of serious, which I quite like that we have that contained within the name.