Porridge Radio

Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me - Released 18-OCT-2024 on Secretly Canadian

Porridge Radio's latest album, Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, released on October 18, 2024, through Secretly Canadian, is a powerful exploration of human vulnerability, catharsis, and emotional turbulence. Dana Margolin leads listeners through the wreckage of burnout, heartbreak, and the pressures of a rapidly shifting reality, offering a collection of songs that feels raw, invincible, and unabashedly honest. The album is full of sharp contrasts: from fragile quiet to explosive intensity, from vulnerability to defiance. Margolin's visceral delivery and the band's forceful dynamics create a soundscape that feels like repeatedly touching an exposed nerve—painful, but charged with a peculiar energy.

The fourth album by the UK quartet—Margolin, Georgie Stott on keys, Sam Yardley on drums, and Dan Hutchins on bass—follows the success of 2020's Every Bad and 2022's Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky. Those records transformed Porridge Radio from a fringe indie-punk band into a critically acclaimed touring powerhouse. But as much as success has propelled them forward, it also left Margolin exhausted and grappling with the jagged remnants of her personal life. The raw emotions of Clouds are distilled into songs that began as poems—each line laced with potent simplicity and stark imagery. Margolin's voice often feels like a force of nature, whether she's intoning softly or screaming herself ragged, and the band matches her energy with sounds that veer between coruscating noise and brittle beauty.

Recorded in rural Somerset with producer Dom Monks, known for his work with Big Thief, the album stretches into wider sonic spaces than anything Porridge Radio has done before. Songs like "Pieces of Heaven" balance gentle guitar picking and brushed drums with Margolin's haunting vocals, while "Sleeptalker" erupts from near silence into a triumphant brass fanfare. The band's instrumentation, whether it's flugelhorns or clattering typewriters, serves to underline Margolin's searing emotional performances. On "God of Everything Else," Margolin doesn’t just evoke the chaos of a breakup; she levels the entire landscape with her fury, casting herself as a nuclear blast, the "god of everything else."

But Clouds isn’t just about explosive moments—it's also about the aching grief that smolders beneath rage. There's a mourning for love lost, for the promises of success that fell short, and for the imagined versions of Margolin that never came to be. On "A Hole in the Ground," she sings of her heart falling apart, refusing any neat resolution or false closure. Instead, she turns her pain into something transformative. The closing track, "Sick of the Blues," offers a flicker of hope, an almost euphoric leap towards feeling OK. It’s a striking, deliberate choice, tying a bow on an album that is surprising and invigorating in its honesty—an unapologetic reckoning with being human.

Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me is more than an album—it’s a statement of resilience, of embracing the messiness of emotions, and of turning tumultuous pain into anthems of invincibility. Margolin's complex lyrics and the band's daring arrangements prove that even in flux, there is power in letting go, in being vulnerable, and in rising from the ashes stronger than before.