It’s hard to believe that Austin’s Porcelain are barely a year removed from the release of their self-titled debut collection of storming post-hardcore and searing noise rock, which dropped in February 2024 via Portrayal of Guilt’s label of the same name. After touring extensively with bands like Chat Pile and Pelican, they were among the first acts signed to local photographer Pooneh Ghana’s TODO Records, which was announced via a new single called “Harmony.” Now, they’re sharing that they seem to have more material recorded from this new era of the band—which is more inspired by their live show—with another new track called “Torch.”
“With the new tunes, we made a concerted effort to just capture how we sound as a live band, with the hope of capturing that same energy as best we could in a recording setting,” shares the band’s bassist Jordan Emmert. “We tracked with our bud Bryan Dalle Molle, who was running live sound at Hotel Vegas here in Austin at the time, so there was plenty of familiarity with regard to how we sound live and ample context from a performance standpoint for when we were recording. We split tracking between Bryan’s house and our practice space, and then had the tracks mastered by Matthew Barnhart at Chicago Mastering Service, who do amazing work.”
This sense of comfort working among established collaborators—and with each other—is on full display with the pummeling new single, which additionally leans further into the band’s perceptive take on a quickly dying empire. “Lyrically, the newer songs are reflections of loss and the world seemingly crumbling around us in a late-stage capitalistic hellscape,” notes guitarist/vocalist Steve Pike. Adds Emmert, “I often feel that we’re just pulling from some big grab bag of our guitar influences, and the new songs seem to really reflect this—a bit of a collage of a bunch of bands we dig from the ’80s and ’90s. And yes, also the hellscape.”
Check out a visualizer for the new track below, and expect more from Porcelain in the near future.
