If the title of Porridge Radio’s new report affords a reassuring sense of permanence, then it’s hard-won as a result of the whole lot else about it exists in a state of flux. Right here, Dana Margolin is each heartbroken and hopeful, drained to her bones and able to scream her lungs out, with surging melodies and uncooked guitar noise overtaking moments of grim introspection. Taken as a complete, it’s like touching an uncovered nerve time and again.
It’s additionally one thing of a pure response to the one-two punch of 2020’s ‘Each Unhealthy’ and 2022’s ‘Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky’, albums that turned Porridge Radio from a fringe indie-punk concern right into a critically-lauded touring machine. Margolin wrestles with this new actuality, writhing underneath the microscope whereas sorting by means of the wreckage of a breakup. Ideas jut out and in, making a jumbled mess of emotions that the band – Margolin on guitar and vocals, Georgie Stott on keys, drummer Sam Yardley and bassist Dan Hutchins – counter at every flip with sounds which are equal components brittle and coruscating.
“I don’t need to know anyone else,” Margolin sings on the opener ‘Anyone’, her affected person, wiry guitar line finally dropping right into a cacophony that’s one step faraway from post-rock. It conjures the gut-emptying catharsis of the band’s dwell sound whereas daring her to up the ante once more emotionally.
Writing whereas on the street and as soon as there was time to decompress afterwards, the band’s chief first assembled these songs as poems. You don’t have to know that for certainly one of her turns of phrase to slug you within the abdomen, but it surely does clarify the bare-bones efficiency behind their development. “I’m the asphalt, I’ll by no means die,” she sings of dissociating on ‘Lavender Raspberries’, having moments earlier steered leaping from a balcony.
All through, Margolin and her bandmates underline and subvert her lyrical intentions with preparations which are extra hard-nosed and shocking than the rest of their catalogue. On ‘God of Every little thing Else’, she dials up a way of outsized self-love – “You’ll be hit by a wave of me,” she sings – however as a substitute of leaning into this grandiosity, they puncture it with a sequence that resembles a Fugazi-esque minimalist post-punk groove.
By means of distinction, closing with the stomping, nearly euphoric ‘Sick Of The Blues’ does supply that last blowout. It’s a deliberate leap in the direction of feeling OK and in addition a bow tied round a report that’s shocking, affecting and invigorating in its honesty.
Particulars
- Launch date: October 18, 2024
- File label: Secretly Canadian
