Porcelain Tongue have dropped their new single titled ‘Orbiting’, from their upcoming album ‘Don’t Obscure The Sun’, releasing September 10th via Mishap Records and Moon Ruins Records with the vinyl release being August 29th.
‘Orbiting’ understands something that plenty of songs about heartbreak somehow forget: sometimes the mature response to emotional wreckage is not another round of emotional wreckage. The latest single from the upcoming album ‘Don’t Obscure The Sun’ takes the familiar territory of grief, separation, and letting someone go, then gives it enough electricity to keep it from collapsing into a puddle of sad guitars. This is music for staring dramatically out a window, sure, but it also has the good sense to make the window shake a little.
The song moves through a beautifully unsettled mix of doubled guitars and glitchy, almost synthetic textures, creating the sensation of something constantly circling without ever quite landing. That tension fits the subject perfectly. ‘Orbiting’ feels caught between holding on and finally understanding that holding on is sometimes the thing keeping you stuck. The guitars give the track its weight while those strange electronic tones add a slightly warped atmosphere, as if the song itself is trying to process a goodbye through a machine that was never designed for feelings.
What makes Porcelain Tongue particularly compelling is the way they refuse to treat darkness as the final destination. Max Voulelis writes from the wreckage, but there is still light leaking through the cracks. The lyrics carry the emotional gravity of mourning and loss without turning into the sort of grandiose misery that requires a fog machine and twelve candles. Instead, “Orbiting” finds something more interesting in the aftermath. There is acceptance here, but it is the hard earned kind, the kind that arrives after you finally stop pretending you can control where another person goes.
As the final advance single from ‘Don’t Obscure The Sun’, ‘Orbiting’ makes a convincing argument for why Porcelain Tongue should be firmly on the radar of anyone paying attention to the current indie rock landscape. The band has figured out how to make heaviness feel expansive rather than merely loud, and how to make melancholy feel strangely invigorating. ‘Orbiting’ is bruised, atmospheric, riff driven, and unexpectedly hopeful, which is a pretty good combination for a song about saying goodbye. Apparently, sometimes letting go does not mean disappearing into the darkness. Sometimes it means finally finding the light.
Featured image by Slater Coffin.
About Porcelain Tongue
‘Orbiting’ is about letting the storm through and accepting that sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to let someone go. With doubled guitars and glitched out almost synth tones, ‘Orbiting’ oscillates through the landscape of togetherness and what it means to say goodbye.
This track is the last advance single from the group’s upcoming full-length album ‘Don’t Obscure The Sun’.
Their follow-up to their debut album ‘Goodbye Peggy’ finds them often dealing with the same tribulations, those of grief, mourning, and loss, but Max Voulelis’s lyrics often tinge with a rosy hopefulness.
The songs as a whole ride a tight line between anthemic and riff-driven heaviness, and they bounce back and forth between these ideas of yesterday and tomorrow thematically front to back. Voulelis writes of people making up shapes, taking up light, and leaving somewhere he can’t see. ‘Don’t Obscure The Sun’ once again proves Porcelain Tongue is one of Boise’s most exciting bands to listen to today and though the album’s markers are of life’s bitter trials the songs show there is light in the dark.
‘Don’t Obscure The Sun’ Tracklist
- Unhearable Void
- The Ground Beneath My Feet
- Understanding Time
- Light Pours Out
- Windows
- Interlude
- Fog and Sleet
- The Sun In Your Palm
- Orbiting
- Break Apart Light
- Fades Through
LINKS:
https://www.instagram.com/porcelaintongue/
https://porcelaintongue.bandcamp.com/
https://mishaprecords.com/collections/porcelain-tongue
https://tidal.com/artist/21376541/u
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/porcelain-tongue/1532304090
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6CKmORyIDwsuGrVmclQMXU