Porij today announce their much-anticipated debut album, Teething, set for release April 26th on Play It Again Sam Records (Nation Of Language, Editors and Lykke Li). The 4-piece, who have carved a niche at the forefront of Queer-led dance-pop, also today announce a string of UK and US dates, including their biggest London headline show to date at Electric Ballroom. The new album is co-produced by the band and the legendary David Wrench (Frank Ocean, The xx, Young Fathers). With warm-up slots for Metronomy, Coldplay and Friendly Fires alongside their own crowd-igniting shows. The arrival of Teething invites you to take a leap beyond seeing dance music as a genre, built from this type of kick or that type of snare, and instead as its own dimension: a place you can escape to. This week the band embark on a series of intimate UK shows, all of which sold out on announce.
New single My Only Love is about the safety and comfort of a settled relationship, for better or worse. Egg’s voice is tender, like a familiar hand stroking your cheek, while the beat plunges into a cosmos of dream-like denial: “I don’t know if this will be my forever love but it’s my only love for now.” It jolts against the boundaries of genre in a similar manner, as Porij describe it, to a DJ approaching a club set – fluid, playful and ever-changing. The accompanying video finds the band at their most tender and human – a striking development compared with their fun-filled visuals to date.
On the new single, Porij say: “I went to see ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’ at the National Theatre and was completely struck by a moment in the closing monologue which has the line “Dancing with eyes half-closed because to open them would break the spell.” This felt so fitting to how I was
immediately dealing with the conflict I was experiencing. The power of succumbing to denial felt particularly inviting. Over time the lyrics settled and this song anchors on the thoughts in the bridge saying ‘I don’t know if this will be my forever love but it’s my only love for now’. It’s easy to put pressure on a long term relationship but through this song I remembered to enjoy each moment and not take things too seriously.”
On the accompanying video, director Maxi McLachlan says: “I came up with the idea that I wanted to show Egg travelling between snapshots of love between real couples, friends and lovers, jumping in and out of photos.I didn’t want the video to be cynical at all, there’s plenty of work exploring our photo-taking obsession (especially in the age of smartphones), I wanted this to just celebrate the joys our modern access to cameras can bring us. My hope is that it gives anyone that watches it a warm, nostalgic, fuzzy feeling and makes them remember some special people. Lord knows there were plenty of them involved in the making of this!”
Porij have endured the sharp pains of self-discovery. Every raw nerve, every bloody scrape and sprain, have been necessary for that unavoidable thing we must grit our teeth and bare: growing up. Vocalist and keyboardist Scout Moore (Egg), bassist James Middleton, guitarist Jacob Maguire and drummer Nathan Carroll are armed with hard-won experience, strengthened bonds and a renewed sense of passion. Their debut album Teething is both a coming-of-age story and a bottling of the particular magic that is unmistakably – and definitively – Porij.
Rather than floating just beyond our reach on a digital cloud, Porij are a real band anchored to tangible sound. Following their success over the last 3 years , the band had awoken an appetite for something we didn’t realise we were so hungry for: a collision of between the worlds of indie-rock and dance music, weaving together the organic with the electronic to create something at once tender and transcendent.
Teething is an admission of vulnerability that is saved by its euphoric production which follows Egg faithfully like a spotlight, a companion in the dark. “In that time, I felt like I was really insular,” they reflect. “I was writing a lot of poetry day to day, and I’d just moved to a new flat. I knew we had this deadline, and I became slightly nocturnal, walking around at really odd times in the very early morning writing lyrics.” There is a particular song on the record which Egg found it frightening to let go of. Stranger is about their personal experience as a non-binary individual, touching on themes of gender dysphoria and highlights how the smallest things can carry the most weight. But with the lightness of the beat, there is relief.
Teething proves that change can cut deep, but the propulsion to keep moving is what saves you.
