Song of the Day: PAWS - No Grace

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part of our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJ’s think you should hear. Today’s song, featured on the Afternoon Show with Kevin Cole, is “No Grace” by PAWS from their 2016 album, No Grace, on FatCat Records.

PAWS - No Grace (MP3)

Bored and restless, PAWS was born from members of the Glasgow quartet A Copenhagen Hope, with three members remaining from that band to form the garage pop trio PAWS after jamming with each other for a few days. Recording nearly as fast as they could write the songs, PAWS put out their first cassettes on their own label before being signed by FatCat early in 2012. Their debut album, that year's Cokefloat!, spurred on more extensive touring, as did its followup, 2014's Youth Culture Forever. (The tour behind that album contained a notable spat with Morrissey.) In the summer of 2015, the trio recorded their third album with blink 182's Mark Hoppus, with the album, No Grace. eventually seeing release a year later. The group have gradually grown a little more serious without losing any of their pop-edged spunk across the past few years, and the title track to No Grace embodies the culmination of that evolution. Cut from the same cloth of dramatic pit revelations as some of their fourth wave emo contemporaries (The Hotelier, Into It. Over It.), but trading those bands' grandiosity for classic SoCal ferocity and a stadium-ready snarl from guitarist/vocalist Phil Taylor, "No Grace" is the kind of anthem that was built to soundtrack life-changing basement shows. Fortunately, it's got enough hooks and momentum to make it easy to follow the Scots into that fateful pit.

PAWS will spend the summer touring the United Kingdom, but if they return Stateside, that news will be on their website and Facebook. Below, watch the band play "Catherine 1956" live on KEXP in 2013.