A certain kind of pain ends up making you feel invincible if you carry it long enough. Dana Margolin howls from that unstable station on “God of Everything Else,” which is not a breakup song so much as it is a hurricane rippling the surface of an open wound. “Don’t need to know where you are/You’ll be hit by a wave of me/I’m the god of everything else/You’re the god of losing me,” she seethes. She’s not just stepping out of a relationship that’s run its course. She’s leveling the whole city to crush the person who blew it. She’s not a scorned lover; she’s a nuclear blast.
Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me, the fourth album from Margolin’s band Porridge Radio, arrives at the tail end of an exhausting stretch for the UK quartet. Their previous two albums, 2020’s Every Bad and 2022’s Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, vaulted Porridge Radio to visibility, garnering UK chart placements and nominations for major awards. As many artists must now do to stay solvent and keep momentum, they toured relentlessly throughout 2022. Then, caught in a marketplace that demands more and more from musicians while paying less, they burned out. Margolin went home to heal from fatigue; as she started to recover, she split from her partner, landing in fresh turmoil. Weaving her long-standing poetry practice into her songwriting, she poured those twin vicissitudes into a crop of ferocious new songs. Clouds is the sound of reaching the very end of your rope, then soaking it in oil and setting it on fire.
Recorded in rural Somerset with producer Dom Monks, who engineered and co-produced Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Clouds unfurls its delicate arrangements and startling contrasts across a wider space than Porridge Radio has ever played in before. Brushed drums flutter over softly picked guitar on “Pieces of Heaven,” leaving plenty of room for Margolin’s voice to spiral to the ground like a dying leaf. “In a Dream I’m a Painting” begins with the mesmerizing sound of drummer Sam Yardley’s fingers clattering across a typewriter. Trumpets and flugelhorns plume at the center of “Sleeptalker,” which erupts into fanfare from close to bare silence.
The album’s quiet hollows give rise to fever pitches of emotional intensity. With “You Will Come Home,” Margolin launches into one of the most incendiary vocal takes she’s ever captured in the studio. “Come home and take care of the mess I’ve made,” she implores of someone she addresses, in true Spencer Krug fashion, only as “Swallow.” She screams herself ragged as the song gallops to a close, her voice burning off all the varnish that once clung to its surface.
Across Clouds, Margolin wrestles with the specter of the person she would need to be to glide frictionlessly through the world: an inexhaustible performer, a calm and smiling face, a person with compact and tidy feelings that never overwhelm her or anyone else. On “God of Everything Else,” she envisions this double as a literal second person in one of the album’s most mystifying and powerful images: “Wishing I was somebody else/Begging you to love me back/I watch the way she stands/And the way her hands move/In a fog of you.” Later in the album, she sings, with barbed irony, as if she’s already transformed into this sanguine doppelganger. “Nothing makes me sad now/Everything makes me happy,” she wails on “In a Dream I’m a Painting,” sounding as if she might either start crying or spitting flames.
In the embers of all this rage smolders grief: grief for a love that tore itself apart; grief for those dreams of success whose realization did not in fact lead to a happy and balanced life; grief for all the imaginary, idealized people Margolin might have been but could not become. “The hard bits of my heart, they fall into the hole and they tear it apart,” she sings on “A Hole in the Ground.” She refuses placid resolution, refuses to fold her pain neatly away. Hers is a world-making torment: It shatters the real and demands its wayward shards forge themselves into formerly unimaginable shapes.
