Music: Sacred Paws haven't lost their spark

SECOND albums can be notoriously tricky, more so when it follows a high-profile debut. Earlier this year, when BBC Radio 6 Music began playing Brush You Hair, the first track Sacred Paws shared from new album Run Around The Sun, fans of the fondly-held duo could cheer.

Fizzing and infectious, it suggested that winning the Scottish Album of the Year in 2017 for first LP Strike A Match had not snuffed out their spark.

That guitarist Rachel Aggs and drummer Eilidh Rodgers felt “very weird” getting the award is understandable: the pair have been playing together since the early 2010s, most memorably as Golden Grrrls, a Glasgow band who made compelling if unconventional pop.

After they split in 2014, Rodgers and Aggs, unwilling to forfeit the simple joy of playing together, founded Sacred Paws.

The band was forged, Aggs says, without “stopping to worry about whether or not other people would accept or 'get' it.”

An effortless weave of nimble West African-influenced hooks and intricate, punky rhythms, people did get Strike A Match, just as they will Run Around The Sun.

“To be honest, I think we would have felt pressure regardless of winning or not,” says Rodgers. “With Strike A Match, it was an amalgamation of all the songs we'd ever written, not knowing if they'd be heard. Knowing people would hear this record, there was more pressure with that.

But knowing people liked the first one helped. If people liked what we did by accident, we thought could maybe do it again.”

Produced, like its predecessor, by Tony Doogan at Mogwai's Castle Of Doom studio, Run Around The Sun was written and recorded over the course of the 18 months till November 2018.

There's a refinement to the songs here, perhaps helped by Aggs's recent move to Glasgow from South London. It's a very satisfying listen, the pair's interplay dotted with brass and splooshes of synths from Free Love's Lewis Cook.

There's emotional depth to these songs, their call-and-response lyrics delivering moments of poetry as in The Conversation, the video to which features live guitarist Jack Mellin from Spinning Coin and bassist Moema Meade.

“You're all wrong, you're walking away,” sings Aggs in the bubbly track. “Why would we ever try to have this conversation?”

“It can take a while but we're walking the same way,” responds Rodgers, almost as if she's another voice from the same mind, recalling the same, silly argument.

“We don't really talk about what we're singing about until now, when we're doing interviews,” says Aggs. “It's a kind of surprise when we discover these nice moments. It's not that we're trying to do it – a lot of it starts as nonsense."

"It's a lack of planning, really," laughs Rodgers.

“Other people trying to work together in this way would find it very awkward,” says Aggs. “But to us it's very natural and I think we're lucky to have found a working partnership that works like this.”

The four play a short UK tour before heading to the US next month. As ever, having fun is the priority, and key to the band's wide appeal.

“Having fun has always helped my confidence," says Aggs. "I don't really care what people think when I'm having fun. We make music for ourselves, often to cheer ourselves up. It's cathartic and it's really nice that it affects other people in that way."

"That's what we want really," agrees Rodgers. "If we're having fun playing live and there's people in the audience having fun, we're really happy."