Album Review: Porridge Radio - Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me (Secretly Canadian)

Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me is the fourth album from Porridge Radio, arriving with the quiet weight of experience. What began in 2015 as Dana Margolin's lo-fi open-mic project in Brighton has since evolved into something more volatile, sculpted, and carrying the tremor of the band's early urgency. After the chart recognition of Every Bad and Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, Margolin found herself burnt out, heartbroken, and hollowed by momentum. Clouds is what followed. It's not a comeback or a concept. It's what remains after the noise stops. She has called it "part coming-of-age, part exorcism." It feels like both and neither. It feels like the after-image of survival. On May 10, the quartet, renowned for their emotionally charged indie rock, will fill Control Club with their signature blend of jagged intensity and cathartic release.

There's a luminous looseness in the mix, recorded with Dom Monks (Big Thief, Laura Marling) in a light-washed studio in Somermix. Guitars hovering just above the floorboards, percussion that lands like breath, and the occasional brass arrangement rising like condensation off the hot stone. On Pieces of Heaven, brushed drums flicker beneath Margolin's near-whispered delivery. Sleeptalker is wreathed in flugelhorns, slowly lifting from hush to a broken ceremony. Then You Will Come Home crashes with unceremonious force, Margolin's voice cracking into its highest, most desperate register.

Throughout, Monks balances widescreen grandeur with pin-drop intimacy. You can hear the room. You can feel the seams of the performance. This band, now including new bassist Dan Hutchins, plays with haunted cohesion. Their shared exhaustion has become a compositional language of its own.

Margolin's lyrics are often looping, blunt, and sometimes childlike. "Nothing makes me sad now / Everything makes me happy / Nothing makes me happy / Everything makes me sad," she repeats on In a Dream I'm a Painting, a mantra unraveling as it's spoken. Her voice is mercurial. At times, she recalls early PJ Harvey in the sense of unguarded volatility — emotive, cracked at the edges, unwilling to sweeten any affective blow.

There's little genre comfort to be found across Clouds in the Sky. They might move from hushed folk textures to guitar surges that skirt with post-rock within the same song. On God of Everything Else, Margolin lashes out at a lover from both sides of the wound in a moment of ritualistic purge. "I spent a year wishing I was somebody else," she howls before collapsing into the refrain: "I wanna be good, I wanna be good, I wanna be good." Repetition is not stasis but a spiral that insists on presence—survival through re-inscription.

The consistent mood is never monotone. The title is its framework. The songs drift, gather, break, and drift again. The production never forces drama. Even in louder moments, the songs know better than to pretend things can be fixed by volume alone.

In this way, the album shares something with the emotional timbre of Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, the way heartbreak can humiliate without dehumanizing. There's also something about Todd Haynes' Safe in Margolin's delivery: the hovering disconnection, the sense of internal collapse made eerily ambient. The voice keeps shifting, not to perform a character but to reveal how little ground there is to stand on.

One can trace affinities here with artists like Grouper or Mount Eerie, who understand quietness as confrontation. But unlike those solitary voices, Porridge Radio remains a band, and there's a collective warmth in how they cohere. You hear it on Sick of the Blues, the album's arena-ready closing track, where exhaustion finally opens into something communal, its chorus sung in battered defiance: "I know I'm sick of the blues / I know I'm sick of the blues / But the blues aren't sick of me."

Margolin has spoken about imagining the live show as a Calder-inspired puppet theatre: absurd, delicate, and slightly surreal. This sensibility pervades the record itself. There's a balance here between the dead-serious and the faintly ludicrous. With its looping syntax and open-ended promise, Clouds in the Sky title carries that same tension. A childlike insistence that the clouds will always be there doesn't.

Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me is a temperature, texture, and set of audible impulses. It doesn't try to clean up the mess or chart a way out. Instead, it walks you through the debris. It lets you stay in the fog. And in doing so, it becomes something more useful than therapy: a record of emotional weather, sung in a voice that neither resolves nor recedes.