photo credit: El Hardwick
Porridge Radio have announced that their debut studio album, Every Bad, will be released 13th March on Secretly Canadian.
Alongside the album news, the band have shared a Sam Hiscox directed video for new single ‘Sweet’, as well as brand new tour dates.
Speaking on ‘Sweet’, lead singer Dana Margolin explained:
“Sweet is a song about holding grudges and learning how to have fun and letting go of an old version of yourself. I was feeling light-hearted when I wrote it, but when we came together to play it as a band, it suddenly felt really dramatic and exciting. When we play it live, the energy in the room always feels really intense, and then suddenly we just explode altogether and it always feels really good.”
The album announcement follows a trio of singles released by Porridge Radio in 2019, which saw the band propelled from a word-of-mouth gem of Brighton’s DIY scene to one of the country’s most exciting upcoming bands.
Birthed from open mic nights around the seaside town, Margolin initially performed bedroom-recorded songs to rooms of polite, unassuming audiences who stared at her quietly while she screamed in their faces. She soon decided to form a band through which to channel her new love of performing and songwriting – and be noisier while she was at it – so Porridge Radio was born.
While the band have self-released numerous demos and a garden-shed-recorded album (2016’s Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers)on Memorials of Distinction, Every Badis a culmination of what has been in their head for some time; the record they have been waiting for the means to record.
It arrives full of grand, sweeping ambition – with vocals so urgent that it often feels like it is moved by compulsion rather than choice, with all the rawness of early Karen O, and influences as disparate as Charli XCX and The Cranberries.
Upcoming single “Sweet” is a creeping self-examination, striking in its minutely observed details, while December release “Lilac” is dominated by a repeated, anxiety-quelling mantra: “I don’t want to get bitter / I want us to get better.”
These mantras and repetitions are something of a signature and nowhere is it more deftly put to work than on Every Bad’s closer “Homecoming Song,” with its decisive, self-awarely poppy percussion, and howling final cry: “There’s nothing inside.”
It’s an apt ending for a record which feels like it is so honestly reckoning with emotions; there’s a sense that by the time you finish, everything has been vomited up – there really is nothing left. “It captures a lot of the feeling from the rest of the album of just needing to get something out, and learning how to do something,” Margolin says.
Speaking the emotional drive behind the record, Margolin explained “A lot of it was figuring out how I want to exist in relation to others, and how to process my own feelings, how to be vulnerable, how to show people how I feel. I struggle with being vulnerable and being open, so that’s something I do through songs.”
And thank goodness she does. Though these songs are deeply personal explorations, expressed via a weird, beautiful musical language all Porridge Radio’s own, they extend a hand to every listener who has felt conflicted, held two feelings in their hearts at once, or flailed around the depths of their own choices and relationships. For those of us who know how that feels, Every Badis a funny, profound little comfort.
Album tracklisting:
1. Born Confused
2. Sweet
3. Don’t Ask Me Twice
4. Long
5. Nephews
6. Pop Song
7. Give/Take
8. Lilac
9. Circling
10. (Something)
11. Homecoming Song
