If the title of Porridge Radio’s new record offers a reassuring sense of permanence, then it’s hard-won because everything else about it exists in a state of flux. Here, Dana Margolin is both heartbroken and hopeful, tired to her bones and ready to scream her lungs out, with surging melodies and raw guitar noise overtaking moments of grim introspection. Taken as a whole, it’s like touching an exposed nerve over and over.
It’s also something of a natural reaction to the one-two punch of 2020’s ‘Every Bad’ and 2022’s ‘Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky’, albums that turned Porridge Radio from a fringe indie-punk concern into a critically-lauded touring machine. Margolin wrestles with this new reality, writhing under the microscope while sorting through the wreckage of a breakup. Thoughts jut in and out, creating a jumbled mess of feelings that the band – Margolin on guitar and vocals, Georgie Stott on keys, drummer Sam Yardley and bassist Dan Hutchins – counter at each turn with sounds that are equal parts brittle and coruscating.
“I don’t want to know anybody else,” Margolin sings on the opener ‘Anybody’, her patient, wiry guitar line eventually dropping into a cacophony that’s one step removed from post-rock. It conjures the gut-emptying catharsis of the band’s live sound while daring her to up the ante again emotionally.
Writing while on the road and once there was time to decompress afterwards, the band’s leader first assembled these songs as poems. You don’t need to know that for one of her turns of phrase to slug you in the stomach, but it does explain the bare-bones potency behind their construction. “I am the asphalt, I’ll never die,” she sings of dissociating on ‘Lavender Raspberries’, having moments earlier suggested leaping from a balcony.
Throughout, Margolin and her bandmates underline and subvert her lyrical intentions with arrangements that are more hard-nosed and surprising than anything else in their catalogue. On ‘God of Everything Else’, she dials up a sense of outsized self-love – “You’ll be hit by a wave of me,” she sings – but instead of leaning into this grandiosity, they puncture it with a sequence that resembles a Fugazi-esque minimalist post-punk groove.
By way of contrast, closing with the stomping, almost euphoric ‘Sick Of The Blues’ does offer that final blowout. It’s a deliberate leap towards feeling OK and also a bow tied around a record that is surprising, affecting and invigorating in its honesty.
