Porcelain

BIOGRAPHY

“Everything has changed,” sings frontman Steve Pike on “Apocalypse”, a track from Austin post-hardcore band Porcelain’s sophomore LP, Today’s Minor Victories; “Not for better but for worse.” It’s a sentiment that reflects a familiar millennial experience: comparing the world you dreamed of growing into with the constant indignities of late capitalism, the interminable imperialist violence around the globe, and the rapidly escalating climate crisis as we barrel past the point of no return. And on a micro scale, it reflects a stage of life marked by great tectonic shifts, by youthful innocence fully giving way to grief and disillusionment. On Today’s Minor Victories, apocalypse is both personally and literally the backdrop, and Porcelain’s churning, roiling, snarling post-hardcore is the tool of choice with which to hack through the weeds.

The members of Porcelain — Pike, guitarist/vocalist Ryan Fitzgibbon, bassist Jordan Emmert and drummer Eli Deitz — are all Austin scene veterans, having played in locally beloved bands such as Exhalants, Super Thief, Votive and US Weekly. When they came together as Porcelain in 2022, it was with the benefit of more than a decade of orbiting each other and building mutual admiration. With Pike in particular growing tired of the more straightforward, aggressive noise rock that he had been playing for years, the idea was to gather four gifted musicians and play whatever felt right. “[We threw] everything on the table, and I feel like all four of our influences really came in,” Pike says. “Especially on this record, I feel like you can hear so many elements of everything that we all really enjoy.”

Around the release of their self-titled debut album in 2024, Porcelain hit the road prolifically, honing their fierce live chemistry across the country and sharing bills at home with such legends as Unwound, The Blood Brothers and Touché Amoré. Songs that would end up on Today’s Minor Victories became staples of the live set, going through various lives as the band worked out their kinks together. “We really wanted to make sure this batch of songs were pretty road-tested,” says Emmert.

All of the writing for what became Today’s Minor Victories was “calculated and purposeful,” says Deitz. “It was pretty fluid, and there were songs that moved pretty quickly and we would put them into live sets. But mostly it was us being able to more fully explore some of the influences that we hadn’t gotten to on the first one,” he continues. “There’s so many more little subtleties on Today’s Minor Victories where it’s like, we’re doing an acoustic song, there’s extra percussive elements, there’s more thought with the way the vocals are being performed. We’re doing different layers, just trying out different things.”

The band worked with Scott Evans at Estuary Recording in Austin, with the intention of capturing the electric energy of their live sound. “[Evans’ approach] is very much like he’s documenting a band in a room. It’s raw, but it also sounds really good,” Pike says. With a week of studio time, the band and Evans were able to work patiently and thoroughly, cycling through multitudes of tones, pre-amps, drums and cymbals. Sonically, it’s the Platonic ideal of post-hardcore; Pike and Fitzgibbon’s guitars are biting, Emmert’s bass menacing and growling, Dietz’s drums indefatigable, and Pike’s vocals raw and emotive. “This is one of the few times I’ve left and felt totally satisfied with how a recording process went,” says Emmert. Deitz agrees: “We got done listening to the record the first time and I teared up, because it was just like, this is the record that I wanted to make.”