Porridge Radio’s fourth album, Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, came from a backdrop of burnout and heartbreak.The London-based band finished up heavy touring on their last album, 2022’s Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, and frontwoman Dana Margolin was left to confront a painful breakup and a deep exhaustion that came from the vulnerability of constant performance.
Margolin began writing these many of these songs as poems, the idea being to remove the places to hide that are built into pop songwriting tropes, making vulnerability and intensity impossible to avoid.The resulting album is fairly astonishing — it’s unmistakably more intense and more widescreen than any of Porridge Radio’s prior releases, bigger in emotional and musical scope yet also weirder and more intimate.
In our interview, Margolin and bassist Dan Hutchins credit their time in the studio with Dom Monks, who’s worked regularly with Big Thief and Laura Marling, as being integral to bringing that out of them.“I think I was a bit of a mess for a lot of the tracking.
I was really struggling a lot, because of how immediate and intense it was,” Margolin says.“And there was a real sense in the room that I was just allowed to feel whatever I was feeling and it was fine, and if I was crying or whatever it was, it was just like, okay, yeah, you can just do that, you don’t have to be or do anything else.
Which really helped get through that process, because it meant that I could give everything to these songs and not worry about collapsing to the ground occasionally.” “[Monks] really allowed us to just exist, and to capture that emotional immediacy in that moment, and he has such a strong philosophy on it.That was really inspiring; I felt incredibly inspired by him.
I think all of us came out of that session having learned so much about ourselves as musicians and having gained so much confidence,” she adds.“It felt like a very healing pro...