After making a triumphant return following their acclaimed sophomore effort Every Bad with “Back to the Radio,” U.K. quartet Porridge Radio have shared another new single, “The Rip.” The penultimate track on the group’s forthcoming album Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky (out May 20 on Secretly Canadian) arrives with a video directed by frontperson Dana Margolin’s sister, Ella Margolin.
The brash, anthemic rush of “The Rip” carries over the raw emotion heard on “Back to the Radio,” blowing all feelings of desire and frustration up to be larger than life. “I pulled it apart / Sick at the seams / Hot day in August / You’re all that I need,” Margolin asserts, fighting to hold her place next to the song’s subject even as she feels any grip she had on the situation slip. When she repeats, “And now my heart aches,” over and over again during the song’s climax, she does so with enough force to topple whoever stands in her path, demanding they acknowledge the pain she feels. There’s catharsis in the sheer force of the band’s delivery that feels universal enough that you could jump around to it with headphones on just as easily as you could yell the words at the top of your lungs in the middle of a stadium crowd.
Margolin talked about the genesis of “The Rip” in a statement:
“The Rip” was the last song to be finished for the album, and we finished it about a week before we went into the studio to record it in March 2021. We wanted it to sound like massive pop, like Charli XCX, but with the instrumentation of bands like Slothrust or Deftones. It took the longest a song has ever taken me to write lyrics for, and they took form over a few years. At the beginning it was a song about a power dynamic where I was in control, by the end it was about one where I had none.
My friends always accuse me of making up idioms and using them like they are well-known phrases and I think this song is full of those. I love the idea of something being sick at the seams, like it’s disintegrating from its core. I like things that are so simple they are universal. I wanted it to sound like when your heart breaks so badly that your entire body aches. I wanted it to feel like your soul is dropping out of your body.
Check out the video for “The Rip” below. You can preorder Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky here.
