“Big Beautiful Sound” begins not with the grand gesture promised by its title, but with the grain of Dana Margolin’s guitar: fingers shifting on strings, chords left slightly porous, a voice testing the dimensions of an unfamiliar room. Released on September 16, 2026, it is Margolin’s first song under their own name after a decade fronting Porridge Radio, and it treats that transition less as reinvention than a close study of what remains when a band’s volume falls away.
Margolin was born in London and began performing alone at Brighton open mics while studying anthropology at the University of Sussex. Porridge Radio grew from those appearances into one of British indie rock’s most emotionally combustible groups, with Margolin’s repeated phrases often turning from private reassurance into public exorcism. The band’s second album, Every Bad, was shortlisted for the 2020 Mercury Prize; Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky reached the UK Top 40 in 2022; and the remarkable Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me followed in October 2024.
Porridge Radio announced its ending in January 2025, releasing the final EP The Machine Starts to Sing that February. A live document from Paris’s Centre Pompidou arrived in November, preserving the band at full stretch. “Big Beautiful Sound” moves in the opposite direction. Recorded in a converted barn in rural Somerset with former bandmates Sam Yardley and Dan Hutchins, its arrangement was restricted to what could fit onto an eight-track machine. Yardley produced, engineered and mixed; Hutchins played bass; Felix Davis mastered; and Ilana Blumberg, Ella Milburn and Tilly Munro supply the choir.
The restriction matters. Porridge Radio’s songs frequently gained force by tightening repetition until it snapped; here, Margolin allows space to perform the same work. Delicate guitar and faintly squeaking synths establish an almost domestic quiet, while bass and choral voices widen the frame by degrees. Margolin’s singing retains its familiar cracked edge, but the climax does not arrive as a rock-band detonation. It glows outward, making the title sound less like a boast than a discovery.
That shape mirrors Margolin’s description of descending a spiral staircase into the earth and finding, at the bottom, “a glowing ember, something luminous.” It also places the song within a lineage of stark British songwriting—from the exposed nerve of PJ Harvey to the communal intimacy of contemporary acts such as Big Thief—without surrendering Margolin’s peculiar mixture of bluntness, mysticism and nervous humour.
Mike Mills and Joe Nankin’s black-and-white video, filmed as intimate portraiture around New York City and produced by Ways & Means, wisely provides no narrative solution; it simply watches Margolin occupy the new name. Autumn performances—including a sold-out October 7 show aboard London’s Golden Hinde and support dates with Ezra Furman later that month—will reveal how this restrained music behaves in public. For now, “Big Beautiful Sound” suggests that going solo has not made Margolin smaller. It has made every sound newly visible.
