Porter Robinson became successful making dance music so young that the first time he ever went to a nightclub, it was for his own show. The North Carolina producer had plenty of time for his sound to evolve from its early aggression into something more melodic on his debut album, Worlds, in 2014. Since then, though, despite becoming big enough to curate his own festival for 30,000 fans in Oakland, California in 2019, he’s been almost silent with his own music.
As he finally returns with the follow-up, he’s revealed a number of reasons why it’s taken so long: writer’s block, anxiety, depression, and the experience of watching his brother undergoing cancer treatment. Listening to the 14 new songs here, we must conclude that things are a lot better now. It sounds almost absurdly happy.
By necessity, every DJ has been forced to think about life outside the club lately. Even before the pandemic, the American-led EDM sound seemed to have reached a dead end, incapable of becoming any more brash and bombastic. Robinson took up hiking, illustrating his recent singles with phone photos he took of clouds and leaves. On the cover of Nurture he’s face down in a meadow, surrounded by flowers where once there might have been raised hands and sweaty bodies.
Reflecting this new outlook in sound, his is still a digital world dominated by intricate electronics and heavily processed vocals, but it sounds fragile, crystalline, the synths cascading forwards in thin shards. I trawled the internet looking for the name of the female guest singer with the Tweety Pie voice, but it turns out it’s all him, tweaking his words upwards until they sound childlike and defenceless.
It’s very cute, with an obvious fondness for the excessively saccharine sound of much Japanese pop, and can grate at times. There’s no irony, just pure positivity. “Look at the sky, I’m still here/I’ll be alive next year/I can make something good,” he sings over a vibrant synth fanfare on Look at the Sky.
The cheesiness is tempered to an extent by the presence of a few acoustic instruments. Lifelike opens the album with a folky violin melody. Blossom is sung over slowly plucked acoustic guitar. Wind Tempos and Dullscythe do interesting things by chopping up piano sounds. On livelier songs such as Unfold and Something Comforting, all bright chords and positive words, he’ll still inspire hands to be raised aloft, but perhaps in an inviting field rather than a shadowy club this time.
