FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Porridge Radio – Every Bad
_________
FOR this Revisiting…
IN THIS PHOTO: Porridge Radio (L-R: Maddie Ryall, Georgie Stott, Dana Margolin and Sam Yardley)/PHOTO CREDIT: El Hardwick
I am looking at an album that came out in 2020. On 13th March, Every Bad, the second studio from Porridge Radio, was released. I remember it coming out. It is a shame that it arrived pretty much the same time as COVID-19 did! I think it was a matter of days before we were locked down. Possibly the worst time to release an album, the Brighton band would have wanted to get on the road as soon as possible – and I am guessing they could not do that until at least 2021! Even though it was well-reviewed at the time and was shortlisted for the 2020 Mercury Prize, I do think that the album might have slipped some by since then. Three years after this incredible album came out, I wanted to spotlight it. Led by the tremendous and super-talented Dana Margolin, Porridge Radio are one of our most promising and striking bands. Every Bad is an incredibly original and memorable album. I use those words a fair bit when describing albums, but it is pretty accurate in this case! I am going to end up with a couple of positive reviews for the excellent Every Bad. A personal and often argumentative album where Margolin is often engaged in heated exchanges with herself, it is a fascinating thing. I have spoken about the timing of the release. The group – Margolin appears alongside keyboardist Georgie Stott, bass guitarist Maddie Ryall and drummer Sam Yardley – were touring when things went into lockdown. It was a very strange time when they were moving to the next level and conquer. That will happen, but it did take a while before they could take this album on the road. Every Bad did get some wonderful reviews. I am going to get to that.
The first thing I want to source is from Stereogum from 2020. They highlighted Porridge Radio as a band to watch closely. Here is a group that put out singles and other releases before their 2016 debut, Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, arrived. Porridge Radio released their third studio album, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, last year. That was met with huge acclaim too:
“The band’s debut album introduced Margolin as a compelling songwriter, penning diary entries over scratchy, lo-fi indie rock, rising alongside an ever-fertile UK DIY scene that boasts the likes of London’s Goat Girl, whose vocalist Lottie Pendlebury possesses a similarly creepy twang to Margolin. On Every Bad, though, Porridge Radio’s vision seems altogether bigger. With immaculate, muscular production, the songs themselves feel larger in scope.
Opener “Born Confused” is a poppy, punchy statement of intent that shows the band’s desire to move beyond basement venues and lo-fi adaptations of solo songs, keeping the intimacy and directness of Margolin’s bedroom concoctions before adding melodic, surging swathes of indie rock that lift them above and beyond their peers. The songs drift towards dream-pop (“Nephews,” “Pop Song”) and straight-ahead indie (“Give Take”) but any disparity in terms of genre across the album is balanced by Margolin’s remarkably consistent voice, always bringing the songs back to repeated mantras that are sung with enough fervor to ensure they can’t be dislodged.
Though Every Bad is the band’s second album, everything points to it feeling like a debut: It features a few songs dating back to the beginning of the project, and its booming production gives it the feeling of a significant breakthrough after five years of toil. Today, they’ve officially announced the album will arrive on 3/13 via Secretly Canadian. The announcement comes with a new single, “Sweet.” Following superb recent tracks like “Give Take” and “Lilac,” “Sweet” is another leap forward for the band, Margolin’s lyrical adaptability coming to the fore.
“You will like me when you meet me/ You might even fall in love,” she sings over indie rock that swells and retreats like the ever-present sea. You can’t quite work out whether it’s an honest, endearing statement or a slightly creepy one. This intriguing middle ground continues throughout the album, with a lot of second guessing required on the listener’s part. Margolin says she wrote the song trying to imitate Lorde’s nimble, playful “Loveless,” from 2017’s Melodrama — and though musically the pair don’t have too many ties, they both possess a similar emotional dexterity.
That same phrase is repeated many times throughout “Sweet.” Across the entirety of Every Bad, the songs are often defined by what feels like endless repetition of their refrains. “Thank you for making me happy” goes the end of “Born Confused,” repeated until Margolin’s delivery becomes a ragged roar, while closer “Homecoming Song” once again centers on one phrase: “There’s nothing inside.”
“Singing that over and over, you feel like you’ve let out this demon from inside of you,” Margolin laughs. “It’s the most cathartic feeling to do that, it feels so strong and big and good. There’s a lot of repetition in the lyrics, and it feels really good to just repeat shit over and over again until it becomes something bigger”.
Even though we only got over the worst of COVID-19 last year, things were opening up a bit in 2021. The Guardian spoke with Porridge Radio that year and caught up. It did seem that lockdown afforded the group with opportunities to reach people and work on new material. You could sense the relief that they eventually got to bring Every Bad to the people – albeit, far fewer than they would have liked:
“Last February, Porridge Radio were playing some gigs in Oslo and getting ready for their lives to change. They were about to release their second album, Every Bad – their first since signing to indie label Secretly Canadian – and they knew they were on the brink of something big. Originating from the Brighton DIY scene, the band had recorded their first album in a shed and spent five years organising their own tours. Now they were about to fly to the States to play South by Southwest, followed by a US tour with Car Seat Headrest, followed by a headline tour and festival season back in the UK.
“I was ready to be on the road full-time, not having a break, not thinking about myself,” says frontwoman Dana Margolin. News stories about coronavirus, then, were just background noise. “We’d heard rumours, but we were all swept up in our own worlds. You can’t really plan for the worst – you just have to plan for things to happen.”
A few things happened in quick succession. They returned to the UK, played a few more shows, and on 6 March appeared on the cover of NME, with Margolin declaring Porridge Radio “the best band in the world”. The sentiment was echoed by music critic Everett True (the man who brought Kurt Cobain on stage in a wheelchair at Reading in 1992). On 13 March, Every Bad was released to breathless critical acclaim: Pitchfork called it “sometimes twisted, often transcendent, always incendiary”, Paste magazine “an emotional and instrumental triumph”. Comparisons were made to everyone from PJ Harvey to Karen O, Pixies to Sonic Youth.
“This whole thing about buzz bands and hype and momentum – I find it quite funny,” says Margolin with a wry smile when we speak over Zoom, “because we were so outside of that world for so long. And now I look at it and I’m like: ‘Oh, that’s us – that’s hilarious. OK, sure, I’ll go along with that.’” But, a week after their album release, everything came to a grinding halt. Just as these accolades were coming in, the band had to announce that all their gigs were being cancelled. “There was this weird dissonance – it was a bit of a headfuck.”
The band was formed in Brighton in 2015 as “a space to be vulnerable and creative, where you could scream or lie on the floor or make music”. Margolin had been writing songs in her bedroom and attending open-mic nights when she joined forces with keyboardist Georgie Stott, bass guitarist Maddie Ryall and drummer Sam Yardley. Their 2016 debut, Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, sounded cheerfully ramshackle but showcased their manifold strengths: a keen ear for melody, effective loud-quiet-loud contrasts, Margolin’s powerhouse of a voice. The promise of this early release evolved into Every Bad, a fully formed, sweeping roar of an album that dissects the joys and agonies of being young and in love, and then spectacularly not in love. On songs such as Sweet or Born Confused, the deliciously barbed lyrics change meaning with every frenzied repetition, building to a visceral release of pent-up emotion.
Suddenly, with the support of a label behind them and all the infrastructure that came with it, they were reaching more people than ever before. In the early days of lockdown, the band did a series of livestream events – a gig, an agony-aunt session, a painting class – and Margolin connected with fans by sending out zines and merch. The positive press coverage kept rolling in, and in July Every Bad was nominated for the Mercury prize. Things couldn’t have gone much better – except it was all happening through a screen. “The critical response to our album was amazing,” says Margolin. “But as grateful as I am to have a good industry reception, it’s about actually playing the shows and meeting the people who connect with your music.”
That being said, they are not feeling sorry for themselves: in Margolin’s words, “shit happens”. Lockdown provided them with an enforced period of rest, for which she is now grateful. “I don’t think I’d have ever accepted that I needed to stop, but I needed to look after myself, physically, and also my mental health was quite bad. Part of me was secretly relieved.” She spent a lot of time writing, painting, cooking, going for walks, volunteering for a local food redistribution charity; in order to help with anxiety, she learned about breathing techniques. She recently enjoyed organising a Porridge Radio meme contest, in which fans superimposed the band’s lyrics on to images for comic effect. “When you give people a bit of a free pass to take the piss out of you, it’s great to see what they do,” she laughs. “But also, ouch.”
Lockdown gave the band time to work on their next record, as well as collaborating with fellow DIY artists Piglet and Lala Lala; a remix album is in the works. They’re hopeful that everything they had planned for 2020 will materialise either this year or the next. They might be able to play some shows this summer, outside and socially distanced; their UK tour proper is scheduled for November, with more dates and bigger venues than they had planned last year”.
Let’s wrap up with a couple of reviews. There was widespread positivity for the award-nominated Every Bad. Announcing Porridge Radio as a huge future proposition, it was not only here in the U.K. where the album resonated. Sites like BrooklynVegan put it in their list of the best albums of 2020. Pitchfork did too. Here, NME also made it one of their favourites of the year. Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky has firmly put them on the musical map. This is what The Line of Best Fit noted about Every Bad in their review:
“I’m bored to death let’s argue” is the very first line of the record, and it immediately sets up the tempestuous personality that’s going to be leading the listener through this collection of bruised rockers.
It's Margolin’s towering presence that becomes the focus of Porridge Radio’s music, and there’s no doubt that she makes a compelling leader. This is largely thanks to her vocals, which can effortlessly sweep from hopeless dreamer to unimpressed pessimist to infuriated rebel; melodic singing to lip-curled sneer to full-throated growl.
She has a way of weaponising her different voices to convey the irony of her feelings, as on “Sweet” where she repeats “I am charming I am sweet / and she will love me when she meets me” – her deadpan tone betraying that she’s barely convinced she can keep her temperamental side under wraps. Other times she makes no bones about expressing her discontent, as on “Long” where she yelps “You’re wasting my time” – and you have the distinct feeling that you don’t want to be the person facing down the barrel of that accusation.
These are shades that suit Porridge Radio down to the ground, as they’re able to convert Margolin’s peaks and troughs of passion in their bristling riffs and domineering drums, bulking up her moods into beastly storms of feeling. The essence of their songs vacillate between overwhelming fury and beseeching vulnerability, with the band able to pull off these right-angled turns with aplomb, and it’s a trick that never drops below hair-raising.
If there are shortcomings for Porridge Radio, one is Margolin’s reliance on repeating the same lines over and over in every song. It’s a well-worn trick in rock music that undoubtedly builds tension, but when they return to it song after song it starts to lose some of its impact. It could also be noted that Margolin’s lyrics are quite simplistic, bordering on immature, reflecting thoughts that we all had in our enraged adolescence and jaded early adulthood: “I’m never coming back”; “oh we love each other so”; “there’s nothing inside”; “I don’t know what I want, but I know what I want” (all repeated countless times).
Undoubtedly Porridge Radio have the sonic heft to ensure these statements connect on a primal level, and the simplicity can act like a sledgehammer to the heart. It’s captured in one of Every Bad’s most impactful moments on “Lilac”, where she repeats: “I don’t want us to get bitter, I want us to get better / I want us to be kinder to ourselves and to each other.” It’s a sentiment that we’ve heard expressed a thousand ways by a thousand people, but Porridge Radio imbue this mantra with new weight through their dynamic building and crumbling noise all around it.
This is what will keep people returning to Every Bad: the simple relatability and unfussy-but-exhilarating approach. There’s nothing too complex about what Porridge Radio do, but they do it very well, and Every Bad is unlikely to wear itself out soon”.
I will finish with a review from DIY. Whereas The Line of Best Fit gave Every Bad 8.5 out of 10, DIY went half a point further. A few years after its release, Every Bad still sounds remarkable! I keep getting new things every time I pass through it. It definitely should be heard and played a lot more:
“Thank you for making me happy”, repeats Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin on ‘Every Bad’ opener ‘Born Confused’, a sentiment which unsettlingly spirals from its initial whimsical delivery into a pained, otherworldly caterwaul. It sets the tone for a record that never really presents itself as either fully happy or miserable, treading the dense grey area that floats between the two. Dana’s vocal snarls jar against the startling music, itself conjuring a nightmarish atmosphere that plays with both the record’s raw feel and its many dramatic climaxes.
‘Every Bad’ deals with the conflicting emotions of existing in harmony with others. In both sound and lyric it embodies this confusion perfectly. “I don’t know what I want, but I know what I want,” she wrestles on ‘Don’t Ask Me Twice’, one of the record’s many moments as bewildered as they are assertive. All these emotions unfold simultaneously, Porridge Radio unafraid to present utter frustration, contempt, self-deprecation and despondency in its full, brutal glory.
The often-ominous soundscapes that accompany each word are as surreal as they are mesmerising. In its outpouring of emotion, ‘Every Bad’ plays with its own intensity. The cataclysmic ‘Sweet’ glides from minimal sounds to a visceral vocal explosion, while ‘Pop Song’ pairs Dana’s powerful heartbreak with a gentle melody. Each individual moment offers a new tone, a new feeling, but carries the distinct sound that Porridge Radio have made their own.
Few albums carry the raw emotion of ‘Every Bad’, and carry it with such musical confidence. Come closer ‘Homecoming Song’, Dana declares “there’s nothing inside”, having spent the previous ten tracks embracing vulnerability and purging herself of all feeling, both good and bad. That the album has the same effect on the listener is nothing short of incredible”.
I hope that people who have not heard Every Bad give it a spin now. It was played a fair bit on radio when it came out, but I don’t hear it featured that much now. Signed to the U.S. independent label Secretly Canadian, they are in good hands. Last year’s Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky helped get them to new ears and lands. Check that album out too. I know they will keep on releasing simply amazing music. That can only be a good thing for…
THE music world.