Avery Tucker Finds His Way Back to Himself on Paw

The former Girlpool co-founder’s debut solo album is tender, raw and full of spiritual static, a home-recorded exhale that sounds like someone learning how to breathe again. 

When Avery Tucker talks about releasing Paw, his debut solo album after nearly a decade in Girlpool, there’s a calm steadiness in his voice. “I’m really excited to get it out,” he says. “It’ll be nice to revisit it and feel it in the world once it’s released.”

That sense of revisiting, of coming home to something long-forgotten, sits at the heart of Paw, a record that marks not only Tucker’s first steps as a solo artist but also a quiet reckoning with self. Describing this chapter of his life as “in-the-unknown, trusting, and spiritual,” Tucker is clear that Paw isn’t about starting over. It’s about returning – to instinct, to purpose, and to the deeper edge of feeling that first drew him to music.

And he means that literally. Long before Girlpool, before tours, press cycles, and studio time, he was just a teenager writing songs alone in his room, recording them in one take on a single mic. “I was just doing it to do it,” he remembers. “I wasn’t thinking about a deal or anything professional”

That same DIY spirit runs through Paw, even as it carries the polish of an artist who has grown up in public. “When I was in Girlpool, we were in studios with producers and session musicians all the time. Harmony [Tividad] and I were collaborating constantly. It was such a profound experience and something I hold so close to my heart,” he says. “But stepping away brought me back to myself. I wanted to keep it raw and real.”

In that sense, Paw isn’t just a solo debut, it’s a return to the pure creative impulse that existed before the noise of expectation. It’s the sound of someone remembering why they started making music in the first place - a quiet, stripped back world built on guitars, pedal steel, and Avery’s voice, which carries the same gentle ache it always has, just steadier now. You can hear it in Like I’m Young, a song that’s tender and raw all at once, where he sings ‘How far I am from being a man’, the words trembling with both self-knowledge and surrender. Or in Rust, where he asks ‘Can you learn to love what’s happened to you?’ It’s a theme at the heart of the album, not just acceptance but curiosity about the ways pain transforms you. 

“I wanted to write songs as close to the edge of myself as possible,” he says. “That’s kind of always the goal. Like, is this song moving me? Is it challenging me? Is it pushing me somewhere I haven’t gone before?” That edge, for him, isn’t about provocation, but about truth. Paw is a collection of songs that feel raw, unfiltered, and emotionally immediate, unafraid to expose the knots within. Avery describes his writing process less like constructing a record, and more like unearthing one. “I was taking a leap of faith leaving Girlpool,” he recalls. “I just wanted to go as far as I could within myself and let the songs come to me.”

Even the songs that feel effortless are layered with vulnerability. “Some of the easiest songs to write are the hardest ones,” he admits. “Like I’m Young came out of me so easily, but it was really hard to sit with. It felt maybe more for me.” What makes Paw remarkable isn’t just honesty, but the ease with which it holds discomfort. “Every song is healing,” Tucker says. “That’s why I love songwriting so much - It’s how I experience, metabolize, and cope with being here.” 

The album’s title came from a game he and his friends played during recording. “We’d go around and ask, if you were an animal, would you have paws, hooves, talons, wings, or fins?” he says. “And I definitely have paws. I’m a double earth sign, and so I feel really connected to the Earth. It felt obvious.” 

That image became the emotional center of the record. “A lot of the songs are like tantrums,” he says. “Not in an obnoxious way. Just like emotional swells that leave a mark. This record is like my paw print.” 

It’s also Tucker’s dog, Dizzy’s. Her paw appears on the cover, both “gnarly and cute”, a perfect visual metaphor for the record’s balance of intensity and vulnerability. It’s heavy and gentle at once, like so much of Tucker’s writing. He laughs when I tell him the album runs like a movie, and reminds me of Trainspotting, with its mix of grime and beauty. “I love that,” he says. “I’m not really a movie person, my friends make fun of me for that. But, I did see No Country for Old Men. The colours, the purple skies, the dark clouds, that storminess feels like this album to me. It has that same heavy calm.”

The album feels both handmade and cinematic. Tucker co-produced the album with collaborator and companion, Alaska Reid partly in Reid’s parents’ home in Montana against the winter stormy backdrop he was taken back to with No Country for Old Men. “We weren’t planning on co-producing,” he says. “We just hung out, and wrote Knots one day. When we went to record it, the flow between us was so good and inspiring that she was like “Do you want me to produce the rest of the album?” and I said yes.”

It’s a creative partnership that mirrors Tucker’s earliest days - spontaneous, intuitive, rooted in trust. “She really encouraged me to do it myself,” he says. “Sometimes I’d want to call in someone else to play the bass, or the drums, and she’d be like, ‘Why? You sound good!’”

The resulting sound is lush, but unpretentious. 

When he plays these songs live now, Tucker describes the experience as “super healing.” The venues don’t matter. “Seventy people, or seven hundred - it’s about tapping into a force that feels infinite.” On stage, the songs transform again, like old friends who have learned new languages. 

“I love Angel,” he says. “I love how it feels in my body. It’s such a nice ride.” 

In a time when reinvention often comes packaged as a spectacle, Tucker’s quiet approach feels radical. He’s not asking to be understood, only to be heard. “Releasing control and trusting it,” he says, “that’s been a huge lesson for me, in music and in life.” Listening to him talk you get the sense that Paw is more than just an album. It’s the sound of someone taking their first steps back to themselves. A document of learning to believe that making art can be enough. 

Tucker laughs when asked what he’d tell his seven-year-old self, the one who picked up an acoustic guitar after seeing Joan Armatrading perform at a Borders bookstore. “I’d probably say, when you’re 15 and you paint the word ‘fuck’ on your guitar in nail polish, your parents are gonna be mad,” he says, grinning. “So, maybe don’t do that.”

That’s the charm of Avery Tucker. Self-aware, self-effacing, and still as earnest as the kid who just wanted to make noise that felt true. 

Listen to Paw below.