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Alt-rock quartet find solace in poetry with fourth record.

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Before the likes of English Teacher and Dry Cleaning embarked on their own fruitful journeys in the industry, we had the delights of Porridge Radio. A vital voice to the alternative, the Brighton four-piece have brought together campfire folk and indie-rock whimsies since their tenure as a band in 2016.

Their craft in music is certainly one to admire on. In quiet moments, it’s important to be reflective and immersed in your own drive-in cinema. When real life gets a little too overwhelming and your incessant overthinking becomes a problem, you need a catharsis of potency, either as an outcry or as therapy. Before this one, came Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky. A true underground new-wave gem of beauty, it featured some of the groups’ best work to date with End Of Last Year, embracing flight or flight in your twenty-somethings and Back to the Radio, a cathartic birdsong of letting go and sweeping you away for the unprepared. Topping many avid muso lists for 2022 when it came out, many didn’t seem an out or an avenue for the group to dive off into. This was it, the pinnacle. Boy, were we wrong.

When Dana Margolin started working on this fourth Porridge Radio record, there was something different in how the songwriter approached creativity. Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me would turn out to be an album almost entirely comprised of poem start-ups. With Dana looking for an extra challenge into her craft as an artist, it’s often almost too easy for established writers and musicians to hide behind the music itself. But with poems – unfiltered wording possessing a shade of vulnerability – you can’t hide the same way. What results is a band showing their music at their most raw and at their most affecting to date.

The album – entirely devoted to exploring the magic of creating records – is spearheaded by lead, “Sick of the Blues,” is a sober reminder that you are the source of your own happiness and seeking out joy from inevitable heartbreak. Led by Margolin’s aching vocals, this alternative gem is the next chapter for Porridge Radio, as this fourth captures that rare frenetic kind of coming-of-age time in their career where just letting your hair down and enjoying music for what it is, is really the only thing that matters.

Other devastating works such as A Hole in the Ground really give you an idea into the depths Dana undertook into her self-interrogating writing style this time around. It’s explosive alternative new noise and it’s irrefutably powerful.

Much like the bands’ writing style, while it is poignant and beautiful across the 11 tracks, it still has that patient build and tragic intensity that sets apart Porridge Radio from the rest. It’s this raw vulnerability that listeners really relate to and no band does it better than these guys. No repetitive strains or tricks of the music to hide behind, Dana’s artistry – along with the gorgeous backdrop perception – is incomparable.

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