Album Review: Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me by Porridge Radio

Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, Porridge Radio's fourth album, is a treasure trove of lovesick lucidities and unhappy happiness, the older-than-time contradictions of human life. After a year of burnout and a bad breakup, leader Dana Margolin feels lucid and in control on the record, delivering a powerful and meaningful project filled with moments of joy, despair, and rapturous slacker rock highs. Porridge Radio's secret sauce is whatever happens when Margolin's roving, aching vocals meet thrumming, distorted basslines and explosive drum fills.

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Bolstered by alternately brash and spare instrumentation, Margolin continues to explore her signature mix of tortured diarism and heartbroken lovesickness, a listener riveted by the spectacle of her flirting with madness, finding brief respite, then hurtling herself toward madness once again. With opener "Anybody", as with previous work, Margolin holds the torch for romantic extremism. "Don't want to know anybody else", she moans, touting the all-consuming and singular relationship.

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Porridge Radio return with their fourth LP, the follow-up to 2022's wonderful Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky. It's a tough act to follow, but if nothing else Clouds In the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me beats their previous record for longest album title. Joking aside, Porridge Radio are one of the most dependably consistent bands out there, and their brand of dejected slacker indie/alt-rock, particularly on songs like A Hole In the Ground or Lavender Raspberries, will grab you, hold you tight, and won't let go.

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Clouds is the result of a decade making music and touring; years of flights, hotels, set-ups, tear-downs, and somehow finding the time to create more. In 2023, Margolin was burned out, back home, and broken up with. From this solitary hole of exhaustion and heartbreak, she slowly hauled herself up and processed her creative next steps. This included a turn to poetry.

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At certain points on Porridge Radio's fourth studio album - swelling opener 'Anybody', say, or the hauntingly raw 'Lavender Raspberries' - there are dense, crescendoing arrangements that hit as cresting waves, threatening - but never quite managing - to drown frontwoman Dana Margolin completely. Written off the back of a period of intense touring and romantic tumult, 'Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me' is in many ways a record of treading water; it's a body of work that documents not the shipwreck nor the rescue, but rather the furious, beneath-the-surface efforts to keep oneself afloat. Inspired by professional burnout and personal heartbreak, it tackles the thorny question of how artists can invest so much of their identity in external channels - in their work, in their relationships - without losing grasp on themselves in the process.

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