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Feb 17, 2021 By Andy Von Pip Photography by James Loveday

It’s Friday evening as a long week draws to an end and Porridge Radio singer/songwriter and guitarist Dana Margolin is in the middle of baking a cake. “Yeah I’m quite the baker,” she says, laughing as she checks the oven before we begin discussing her band’s new album Every Bad.

The British band—which also comprises of keyboardist Georgie Stott, bassist Maddie Ryall, and drummer Sam Yardley—began as a DIY project; before stories of their intense live performances quickly spread around their Brighton base, gaining them a loyal following. Having released a string of demos and a self-produced album—2016’s Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers—their new release Every Bad is the their first for Secretly Canadian and is certainly a huge sonic leap forward for the band. “I guess you could say we’ve gently finessed our sound,” says Margolin. “It’s definitely a big step up for us and I’m really proud of what we’ve created.” Previous releases saw the band recording in Yardley’s garden shed using a laptop microphone and experimenting within the limitations that this set up afforded them. This time around Porridge Radio have been able to record in a professional studio, which Margolin admits was a huge learning curve. “It was like, ‘Wow, so now we can actually get it to sound exactly how we want it to sound without worrying,” she says.

To describe Every Bad as the band’s debut album, or “first proper album,” is a notion Margolin rejects. “To say that would be a bit like disowning the previous releases, which is why I always call it our ‘debut studio album,’” she says. “The early recordings are a really important part of our evolution as a band. It’s nice to look back on those recordings and although I can hear things I don’t like now, I’m still very proud of what we managed to achieve. It was fun, experimenting, working things out…it was a bit like scrapbooking. However now it feels we’ve made something real. Like we can say we’ve recorded this record which sounds exactly as it should sound and it’s amazing and hopefully everyone is going to fucking love it.”

Porridge Radio’s sound—whilst intense, raw, and thrilling—has sometimes been difficult to pin down in terms of a particular genre or style, with it being described as everything from rock to pop to slacker indie to shoegaze. This is something that Margolin has no issue with. “I’m not very good at describing genres anyway,” she laughs. “When people ask what sort of band I’m in I’m like, ‘Erm…guitars…okay, so that equals rock right? So we must be a rock band!’…. I mean on this album it feels like we are genre-hopping again, but we are four different people so we do all bring our own influences to the table when we record.”

When it comes to describing her own songs, Margolin is a little more reticent, but with good reason. “I hate explaining lyrics in depth,” she admits. “I mean, obviously everything I write has meaning to me. I keep saying this in every interview but it’s really embarrassing being alive. And that applies to over-explaining my inner thoughts. People have asked me to explain certain things and I’m like, ‘What do you want from me? I’m just a person, please don’t ask me to explain my most vulnerable, embarrassing thoughts, feelings, and moments of my life in intimate detail. It’s all there in the songs.’”

[Note: This article originally appeared in Issue 67 of Under the Radar’s print magazine, which is out now. This is its debut online.]

www.porridgeradio.com

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