Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin Launches Debut Solo Single

Dana Margolin, ex-frontperson of the Brighton rock outfit Porridge Radio, has shared their first single as a solo artist. “Big Beautiful Sound” is a spare acoustic ballad; according to press materials, Margolin set themselves a challenge that all of the song’s elements had to fit on an eight-track record. Mike Mills and Joe Nankin directed the equally spartan, black-and-white video. Watch it below.

“We go all the way down together,” Margolin said of “Big Beautiful Sound” in a press statement, “down a spiral staircase into the centre of the earth where there is darkness and nothing can grow, and we chose to go there, and wasn’t it fun, and right there at the deepest depths of the journey is a glowing ember, something luminous, a big and beautiful sound.”

Before their breakup in 2025, Porridge Radio released four studio albums over the span of nine years. Their last LP was 2024’s Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me, which they followed up with an EP—The Machine Starts to Sing—culled from the Clouds sessions.

Read about Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me at No. 26 in The 30 Best Rock Albums of 2024.

Walden Green is a music writer and cultural critic who joined Pitchfork in 2024. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, his work has appeared in Dirt, The Fader, and Philadelphia. He lives in New York. ... Read More