Porridge Radio’s final EP ‘The Machine Starts To Sing’ lands this week – less a full stop than an exclamation mark at the end of a decade-long sentence. It’s a beautifully calculated farewell that transforms their journey from Brighton’s makeshift practice rooms to a Mercury nomination and festival main stages into something approaching poetry. While the announcement might feel like a sudden plot twist to those watching from the cheap seats, for the band, it’s more of a perfectly timed curtain call – a chance to wrap up their story with a flourish that captures everything that made them essential in the first place. Consider it less a goodbye and more a greatest-hits package compressed into one last burst of brilliance.
Porridge Radio began in unconventional spaces and random encounters. Dana Margolin wrote skeletal, confessional songs in her room, then played them at open mic nights. She gradually linked up with drummer Sam Yardley, keyboardist Georgie Stott and bassist Maddie Ryall. They spent the early days trading in noisy, self-recorded experiments and homegrown tours, and they held onto that do-it-yourself identity even after signing to Secretly Canadian. “Having a team, it’s a completely new way of doing things,” Dana once said, reflecting on how they had embraced outside help without losing their scrappy roots. There were early EPs and then a debut album, ‘Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers’, that lived up to its modest title. Recorded in a shed, it blended edgy vulnerability with unpolished riffs, capturing the band at a point where they felt anything could happen next.
By 2020, that “anything” arrived in the form of ‘Every Bad’. It elevated Porridge Radio beyond their shed-recorded reputation, earning them a Mercury Prize nomination and a place in the Top 40. Their front-row seat to the strangeness of a pandemic, which hit just as the album was released, threw them into prolonged uncertainty. They still found a widespread audience by tapping into anxiety and restlessness, pairing it with refrains that went from hushed to furious. Dana once explained, “I talk a lot about boredom, but I don’t actually generally get that bored. I like to stare at the wall and zone out.” That everyday, open-ended feeling seeped into ‘Every Bad”s mantras, which repeated over and over with increasing intensity. The album developed a reputation as a cathartic listen, particularly at a time when fans were searching for something that spoke plainly about frustration and hope. “We’ve just learned and grown so much between the first one and the second one,” Dana said of the band’s shift in approach. “I think we were able to make it sound the way that we wanted it to sound, whereas the first one was a lot more chaotic. We didn’t really know what we were doing.” Listeners gravitated to that directness, and Porridge Radio became one of the year’s great word-of-mouth success stories.
Two years later came ‘Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky’, which showed what was possible once they had enough space and time to shape the songs without pressure. “Sometimes I wanna make a massive pop banger, and sometimes I wanna make a sad little song,” Dana remarked, summing up a refusal to be defined by a single style. The album introduced horns, layered harmonies, and bursts of dramatic noise that nodded to stadium-scale ambitions. Yet there was no obvious pivot to glossy production. The music sounded sharper, but it still held the tension and release that defined their earliest recordings. That balancing act came from a band grounded in shared ideals. Sam co-produced the record, and everyone had a hand in shaping the bigger arrangements. The result felt like a statement: Porridge Radio were pushing further into uncharted territory, but they had brought their original DNA along.
Soon after, the intense touring schedule that followed wore down the group. By Dana’s own account, she emerged from that phase “completely disintegrated,” having lived for a long stretch on the road, between festival stops and the quiet panic of backstage dressing rooms. That burnout and a personal breakup channelled into ‘Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me’, which arrived in 2024 with a heavier emotional weight. At the heart of it was a sense of longing and confusion: the push-and-pull between wanting solace and being unable to stop creating. “I was so miserable, and I sat on my bed and wrote this stupid song,” Dana recalled of that time, referring to how she occasionally wrote out of sheer desperation when she felt she had nothing left to give. The rest of the band, rather than dismiss the work, suggested they keep going. That blend of exhaustion and encouragement led to an album that captured how it felt to be pulled in many directions at once – some songs soared with bold instrumentation, others curled up into delicate shapes that felt deliberately small. Although it sounded different from the more immediate hooks of ‘Every Bad’, it retained the streak of raw confession that listeners had come to expect.
And now, they have chosen to end with ‘The Machine Starts To Sing’. It was recorded alongside the ‘Clouds…’ material but set aside for a separate release that arrives like a final piece of the puzzle. It is concise – just four tracks – but its power is undeniable. Each moment feels focused, aware that this is the last time Porridge Radio will put new music into the world. The title-track builds on a looping structure, with Dana’s voice rising over a gradually intensifying wash of guitars and keys. ‘OK’ began as a private sketch but blooms into a broader, brighter offering. ‘Don’t Want To Dance’ charges along with a force that threatens to topple everything in its path, yet it never loses the sense that it’s on the edge of collapse, which has always been one of the band’s great strengths. The closer, ‘I’ve Got A Feeling (Stay Lucky)’, is quietly triumphant, feeling at once like a farewell and a reminder that shared catharsis can happen even when times are bleak. The band never shies away from the heavier sides of human experience, but they insist on leaving the door open for optimism.
It is easy to forget how small and fragile Porridge Radio’s beginning was when you see how far they managed to go. Their final performances take place in larger rooms than they ever expected to fill back when they were charging around in cramped vans and playing for handfuls of people. They are bowing out with a sense of closure: they have proven that scrappy, honest songwriting can survive commercial recognition, relentless touring, and the swirling demands of an industry that isn’t always kind to introspective souls. “Now, finally, we have emerged in our true form,” Dana once joked, referring to the group’s evolution as a slow unpeeling of layers. It is a line that resonates more strongly in hindsight. They have arrived at that core and are choosing to walk away before it becomes routine or forced.
As ‘The Machine Starts To Sing’ lands, it acts as the last word in a discography that regularly circled around fear, uncertainty, and release. It also highlights the band’s lasting qualities: the tense collisions of guitar, the distinctive presence of keyboards that could be warm or cold depending on the moment, and the rhythm section’s measured push-pull that shaped each crescendo. Those elements, combined with Dana’s ability to be both candid and poetic, gave Porridge Radio an identity that never got smoothed out or tamed. They leave behind music that can evoke many emotions at once – anger, elation, sorrow, hope – and a reminder that speaking plainly about those feelings can unite an audience.
This finale arrives with a sense of gratitude. They could have coasted on that second album or ground themselves down under the weight of expectations. Instead, they reached higher, wrote deeper, and refused to second-guess the vulnerability in their songs. It wasn’t always easy. It required moments of breaking down in a studio or playing through heartbreak on stage. But they always saw creation as a kind of lifeline, a process that, in Dana’s words, helped them figure out how to get to the other side of confusion. Now, they have chosen to pause that process for good, trusting that the music they’ve made will continue to resonate on its own. And at a time when so many bands fall apart without resolution, Porridge Radio are calling it a day with a final release that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with their best work. It all ends as it began: with unfiltered emotion, a desire to keep pushing forward until the last note, and an understanding that everything they needed was in their own hands.
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