Porter Robinson thought he was ready to have fun. After the probing vulnerability of his 2021 album Nurture—wrung out after years spent trying to complicate the candy-painted sheen of his experiments with EDM—the North Carolina-raised musician set out to reconnect with the pleasure-seeking that informed his earliest work. His new album SMILE! :D is garishly nostalgic and unrepentantly joyous, full of maximalist synth leads that glimmer like a Blingee gif and tender-hearted vocal melodies that vibrate with the youthful abandon of songs overheard in suburban skate shops.
On one level, it’s a cathartic release, a relieved exhale after a creative block that led to his last album. With a guest spot from the alt-pop pranksters in Frost Children and a torrent of silly stunts to promote the album’s singles, he signaled his goofy intentions. (At a pop-up event for “Kitsune Maison Freestyle,” he vibe-checked each fan that showed up and gave away clothing from his own closet.) But what’s actually in the songs is more complicated and emotionally raw than his reckless abandon implies.
For the first time, Robinson reveals more of his sense of humor—“Bitch, I’m Taylor Swift,” he deadpans in “Knock Yourself Out XD”—but underneath the vivid colors and silly jokes, he’s wrestling with heavier themes. “Cheerleader,” though built around a synth lead as sickeningly sweet as the dust at the end of a roll of Smarties, grapples with the dynamics of parasocial relationships between fans and artists. Appreciative but anxious, lighthearted yet lacerating, the track’s tone is a tightrope walk made all the more dizzying by the confectionary rush of its instrumentation, which recalls both the impossibly glossy emo pop of late-aughts Warped Tour staples like Metro Station and the post-hyperpop experiments of singer-songwriters like glaive and aldn.
Throughout, Robinson reflects on getting older and becoming an almost-pop star and ever more public figure. Even when he wraps his thoughts in colorful, caffeinated trappings, they hit hard. On “Year of the Cup,” he sings of a desperate, self-lacerating urge to be liked: “I can’t go to sleep/’Cause my mind keeps ringing with times that I laid out everything wrong with me up on stage/It’s embarrassing.” “Easier to Love You” mulls the loneliness of aging, finding disappointment in the distance between the person you are and the person you thought you might become. All the while, he favors arrangements as bright as he’s ever programmed: Tempos remain high, and chiming guitars float skyward in the mix.
The energy is never more striking than on “Russian Roulette,” a peppily bittersweet song that grapples with career exhaustion and suicidal ideation—and takes a tongue-in-cheek swipe at an infamous joke review from Pitchfork’s early years—before ending with one of the most cutting moments on the whole album. After an emo-fueled chorus—“I wanna live/I don’t wanna die”—leads to a bouncy trance outro, a primitive computer-generated voice lectures about dance-music cliches (“The kick drum and bass suggests the song is coming to a close—that’s the format we’re used to”) before scolding, “Don’t kill yourself, you idiot.” Amid such stark contrasts in tone, the sudden vulnerability is strangely affecting.
The split between effervescent sound and downcast mood is jarring. Robinson has been smiling through the pain at least since the loopy yet apocalyptic “Sad Machine,” but something feels different on SMILE! :D, as though he were under less pressure to make sense of the grand, sweeping emotions. He’s willing to be chaotic and a little all over the place, and though that does occasionally result in moments that are hard to process, Robinson proves that he’s as adept at wringing moving moments out of pop tropes as he is conjuring alien worlds.
