Porridge Radio

A songwriter named Dana Margolin leads Porridge Radio, a project whose sound fuses indie rock, slowcore, and art-punk into a taut, nervy whole. The band surfaced in southern England during the middle of the 2010s, and its first full-band release, Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, surfaced in 2016. After gaining airplay on BBC Radio, the group advanced both its production values and emotional intensity on the Mercury Prize-nominated Every Bad in 2020. Two years later, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky pursued a grander, arena-scale aesthetic. Following a breakup, Margolin wrote “Sick of the Blues,” the opening single from the band’s fourth album, Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me, which arrived in 2024.

Porridge Radio began around 2012 as Dana Margolin’s guitar-driven, laptop-recorded solo project in Brighton, England. The first set of acoustic demos, Misery Radio, came out on Eyeless Records in May 2015. Margolin self-released I’m Not Sure Anymore that December and issued the EP Say Sorry or Die early the following year. Also in early 2016, a split EP with West America titled Hello Dog Friendly appeared.

The lineup expanded to Margolin on vocals and guitar, Georgie Stott on keyboards and vocals, Snake Leather (Josh Harvey) on guitar, Maddie Ryall on bass and vocals, and Sam Yardley on drums; together they released the first collective album, Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, in August 2016, tracking it inside Yardley’s shed. Another solo EP, frgttng, followed in October 2016, while the solo album Bad Breath emerged in December 2017. Still austere and unpolished, the latter introduced experiments with sampled sounds, keyboards, and electronics. That same month Porridge Radio put out the seasonal track “O. Christmas.”

Throughout 2019 the band issued several singles and recorded two live sessions for BBC Radio 6 Music. The first proper studio album, Every Bad, appeared on Secretly Canadian in March 2020 as a four-piece after Harvey’s exit and earned a Mercury Prize nomination. With live performances curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Porridge Radio wrote and recorded their next record while playing only a few shows that year. Fresh material arrived via the singles “Good for You” (with Lala Lala), “7 Seconds,” and the holiday-themed “The Last Time I Saw You (O Christmas),” and an expanded edition of Every Bad featuring demos and remixes was released in 2021.

While completing their third album, the group contributed covers of Wolf Parade’s “You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son” and the Shins’ “New Slang” to Sub Pop’s singles club. Co-produced by Tom Carmichael, Margolin, and Yardley, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky reached stores on Secretly Canadian in May 2022. It became the band’s first album to enter the U.K. Top 40, peaking at number 39, and charted just outside the Top 40 in Germany. A subsequent breakup and period of burnout shaped the 2024 album Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me, which introduced bassist Dan Hutchins and was led by the single “Sick of the Blues.”