Porridge Radio

Porridge Radio announce their fourth album, Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, out October 18th via Secretly Canadian, and present its lead single, “Sick of the Blues,” alongside a live video from their recent performance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The band also announces a 2025 North American and UK Tour (tickets are on sale here August 2nd at 10AM local time).

Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me is a coming-of-age moment inspired by burnout, the music industry, heartbreak, and band leader Dana Margolin’s own increasing immersion in her craft as an artist. Across the album, Margolin’s ruthlessly self-interrogating writing style is matched by some of the band’s most affecting music to date, patiently building and tragically intense. “Almost all the songs started out as poems,” says Margolin of her different approach in writing the music. She had learned that a songwriter can always hide behind the tricks of the music. “In a poem, though,” she says, “you can’t hide.”

After relentlessly touring in support of Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, the beginning of 2023 was a period of reflection and knotty questions about identity, creativity, and family. Margolin wanted to work out a way forward – how do you retain creativity without harming yourself in the process? At the same time, after recovering from the burnout, a short-lived but intense relationship ended. The relationship and subsequent heartbreak fed into the genesis of the songs that would make up Clouds, as evidenced in lead single, “Sick of the Blues.”  “A lot of this album is about a more frenetic and desperate kind of love,” says Margolin. “It is about completely losing my sense of self in one relationship, and the deep residue of insecurity and pain that lingered and clouded a new relationship.”

As described by Margolin, “‘Sick Of The Blues’ is about being heartbroken and taking back some joy, remembering that you’re the source of your own happiness, not someone else, even when you’re hurt and left with a hole in your heart. After being messed around enough, you just want to take back control. I just wanted to let it go, stop letting it consume me. I wanted simplicity, to have fun and remember everything good that could possibly happen. To love wholly, to not take anything too seriously. To have fun with my friends, to remove the tunnel vision and fall in love with my life again.”

Produced by Dom Monks, longtime engineer for Big Thief and Laura Marling, Clouds was recorded in Frome at the beginning of 2024 in an environment where Margolin could fully express herself. The band – Margolin (guitar, vocals), Georgie Stott (keyboards, backing vocals), Sam Yardley (drums, keyboards), and Dan Hutchins (bass) – worked more closely than ever on sculpting the album, and for once, they were all able to record in the same room as the producer. “We’ve always been known as a band who do something very particular and very emotionally intense live, and Dom (Monks) knew how to get that feeling across.”

Following the recording sessions, the band was invited to debut this new material, including “Sick of the Blues,” at a special performance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Conceptually led by Dana with her sister, director Ella Margolin, and set designer Ellie Wintour, the ambitious set was inspired by the work of sculptors Alexander Calder and Constantin Brâncuși, complete with a graveled stage, willowy pillars hanging from the ceilings, and mime artists moving around the stage with various props.

Margolin reflects on Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me with the enthusiasm of a real creative breakthrough. “It feels like the first time we’ve made something. It captured something about our friendship as a band and the way that we have learnt to play together.” Margolin continues, “It’s taught me so much. Following your gut to the nth point, trusting your friends and their loyalty, trusting yourself to be able to fight with people properly and still come back together. How I want to live is how I want to make records, because making records is my life because my work is my play is my job is my life. It all ties together in this thing, and there are ways to do this that might not kill me.”