What does that mechanism inside your soul feel like to you? You know the one– that pumpjack, the one that taps that mushy creative well, that motor that engenders your dearest and most vulnerable and strange art? How does it feel when that engine rusts? If you could plunge their fingers into the fleshy cavity of your chest and extract that bloodied thing that makes you an interesting person, if you could oil it up and scrape the scummy outsides of it until it shines like new, lithe, ready to generate endlessly, I’m sure you would. 

Unfortunately, there’s no mechanic of the soul better than its owner, and no material better to lube up the rusty creative spirit than the mechanic’s own inner monologue. Dana Margolin-fronted indie rock group, Porridge Radio, demonstrates their understanding of such in moving new single, “Sick of the Blues.” Tremulous at first, then becoming assured in its own strength, the song asserts itself, as if polishing its own rusty soul, again and again: “Sick of the blues/I’m in love with my life again/Sick of the blues/going to give in to everything”

The single is the first from the group’s forthcoming record produced by Dom Monks (engineer for Big Thief and Laura Marling). Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, the band’s fourth album, will be out October 18th via Secretly Canadian, and will be toured in North America and the UK early next year. Alongside the track, the band has released an accompanying video of their special performance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, directed by Dana’s sister Ella Margolin with a set designed by Ellie Wintour. 

After an emotionally and professionally fraught 2023, Dana Margolin was experiencing complications with creative output related to an intense breakup and a lethargy that accompanied rigorous touring. Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me is borne from those feelings of discomfort, the album cradling heartbreak and exhaustion in its tender palms. 

“A lot of this album is about a more frenetic and desperate kind of love,” Margolin says of Clouds, “It is about completely losing my sense of self in one relationship, and the deep residue of insecurity and pain that lingered and clouded a new relationship.”

“Sick of the Blues”-- a mere taste of what’s to come for Porridge Radio– articulates this dialectic; from vitality comes exhaustion, from exhaustion comes vitality. In the closed circle of the soul, energy is neither created nor destroyed. 

What happens, then, when you feel like you’ve run out of love to give yourself and others? For Porridge Radio, you just have to force yourself to keep running. If you’re sick of the blues, tell yourself so.

I’m sick of the blues. I’m in love with my life again. 

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