Porridge Radio frontwoman Dana Margolin recently gave an interview to the NME that took its headline from one of her quotes: “I’ve always known that we’re the best band in the world.” Margolin went on to suggest the current burst of interest in her band was woefully belated (“Obviously we’re really good and we know it … where have you been?”) and that their destiny lay in performing to arenas and sports stadiums around the world: “I wanna be Coldplay, obviously.”
This swaggering bravado is standard practice from a certain kind of alt-rock band. The same gobby self-assurance helped propel the Stone Roses, Oasis, Kasabian et al on to the front pages of the music press. The difference here is that every one of Margolin’s statements seems to come accompanied by a roll of the eyes. Porridge Radio are a product of Brighton’s fertile but subterranean DIY scene: a world of cassette-split EPs with American noise bands, debut albums recorded in garden sheds, lo-fi covers of Daniel Johnston songs and free all-day festivals in tiny venues alongside bands called Satanic Ritual Abuse. Whatever you make of all this, you certainly couldn’t accuse the people involved of being fuelled by vaulting commercial ambition.
How we got here, with critics already tipping Porridge Radio’s second album for a Mercury nomination and the NME not merely turning Margolin’s sardonic pronouncements into irony-free headlines but agreeing wholeheartedly with them, is an interesting question – one that is answered by Every Bad. It’s slick by comparison with some of Porridge Radio’s early releases, but in an era when most putatively alternative rock arrives coated with such glossy depth that it is indistinguishable from chart pop, the production feels appealingly rough around the edges.
There’s nothing particularly new about their sound: (Something) maroons an Auto-Tuned vocal over heaving shoegaze guitars; Don’t Ask Me Twice and single Sweet are among a number of tracks that rest on dynamic, Pixies-esque shifts between quiet and loud. This reveals Margolin as one of rock’s great screamers: her hoarse, guttural sound seems dredged up from somewhere deep within, an authentic expression of something dark and tormented rather than an edgy embellishment. Elsewhere, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to picture Porridge Radio’s spindly guitars, shouty backing vocals and shadings of violin and cheap-sounding synth arriving 40 years ago, being signed to Rough Trade and heading out on a package tour alongside Essential Logic and Swell Maps.
Their skill lies in rearranging familiar elements into something that sounds fresh, largely down to their curious take on songwriting. Porridge Radio are melodically strongest when they seem to be trying the least hard. Their most obviously pop-facing material, recent single Give/Take and the prosaically titled Pop Song, lands in the middle of the album and feels a little flimsy and forced compared with the songs around it, where the standard verse-chorus structure tends to dissolve into the insistent repetition of a single phrase.
The first track, Born Confused, has an attention-grabbing opening line – “I’m bored to death, let’s argue” – and a faintly anthemic chorus, but it’s over and done within 90 seconds. The remaining half of the song is given over to the phrase “thank you for making me happy”, which starts out sounding bitterly ironic (Margolin has a great line in delivering lyrics in a bruised tone that suggests their very opposite) – but gradually becomes first cathartic and then weirdly, straightforwardly joyous. It’s a strange way to go about getting audiences to punch the air, but it really works.
Lilac, meanwhile, turns that emotional journey on its head. This time around, Margolin repeats: “I don’t want to get bitter, I want us to get better, I want us to be kinder to ourselves and to each other.” What looks like a self-help platitude on paper slowly builds up a power at odds with its sentiment, becoming increasingly frenzied and raw-throated, in a way that completely undercuts any optimism. By the end of the song, it sounds confoundingly like a threat.
This tension of opposites is a recurring theme, not just in Margolin’s ability to destabilise a lyric with her voice, but in the words themselves. They’re big on inconsistency – “I don’t know what I want, but I know what I want” – and frequently sound like frantic internal dialogues that capture a very twentysomething brand of angst, where the realisation that you’re now an adult crashes against uncertainty about whether you’re doing adulthood correctly.
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Every Bad is an album made by a band who are something of a contradiction: from a resolutely uncommercial background, they’ve somehow ended up making something that could be – and certainly deserves to be – big. But without losing their strangeness.
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