Circling

Some songs move forward. This one goes around. "Circling" is built on a single reassurance, offered again and again, and the whole point is that the reassurance never quite settles the matter. The more it is repeated, the more it sounds like something a person says to keep from sinking.

Dana Margolin, who writes and sings for Porridge Radio, has been unusually direct about what the song is doing. She describes it as an attempt to will things into being okay by insisting that they are, because she needs them to be.^[1] That small admission changes how the song sounds. What could pass for calm is closer to a rope thrown to oneself.

Where the song sits on Every Bad

"Circling" appears as the ninth of eleven tracks on Every Bad, the band's second album, released on 13 March 2020 by Secretly Canadian.^[5] It was issued ahead of the record as a single with a video, and arrived on a record that critics received with near-universal praise, collecting a Metacritic score in the mid-eighties and a Mercury Prize nomination.^[5]

The album is the work of a Brighton band that grew out of Margolin's bedroom recordings. She has said she began making music alone as a teenager, knew little about songwriting or production, and let the raw sound of those early recordings come from not knowing what she was doing.^[4] Friends from Brighton joined her, and by the time of Every Bad the band had the muscle to match the size of her feelings.

Margolin has called the album an unfinished sentence, a record of open-ended songs that do not hand over all the answers.^[4] She has also described it as an effort to find hope inside difficult and sad things.^[4] "Circling" may be the clearest demonstration of both ideas, since its hope is real but never quite believed, and its sentence keeps starting over.

The sea as a way of feeling

Margolin has said that "Circling" was one of the last songs she wrote for the album that focus on water, and that Every Bad leans heavily on the sea.^[1] The connection is personal. In interviews she has described Brighton's beach as a refuge when she felt low, a place to stare at the water or swim, where the sea could feel both terrifying and calming, like standing at the edge of everything.^[4]

For this song, she has said she tried to capture the feeling of waves: they keep arriving, they wash everything away without judgment, and then they come back.^[2] That is a striking way to describe an emotional pattern. A wave does not solve anything. It erases what was on the sand, and then the sand is bare again, ready for the next arrival.

The same logic runs through the song's structure. One critic called it an epic waltz,^[3] and the triple-time sway fits the image well. A waltz is a figure that turns back on itself. Another reviewer heard a swirling, seasick composition that moves elliptically rather than in a straight line.^[1] Both descriptions point to the same effect: the music does not travel toward a resolution. It rocks, and the listener rocks with it.

Repetition as comfort and as symptom

Repetition is the central device here, and Margolin has been thoughtful about why. She has said that repeating a phrase until it becomes something bigger feels cathartic, almost like releasing something from the inside, and that she likes how a single sentence can hold many meanings and feelings at once.^[4]

That second point matters for reading the song. The reassurance at its center is not one statement but a changing one. Early on it can sound like a hopeful mantra. A few passes later it sounds like denial. Later still it takes on a pleading edge, and by the end it can feel almost like a dare. The words barely change, but the weight shifts underneath them, which is exactly what happens when anyone repeats a phrase until it loses its footing.

Anyone who has lain awake telling themselves that tomorrow will be fine knows the mechanism. Repeating the line is both the remedy and the evidence that the remedy is needed. If things really were fine, there would be no reason to say so again. The song lets that contradiction stand without resolving it, which is part of why it hits so hard.

The voice at the center

Much of the album's reputation rests on Margolin's delivery, which reviewers have described as urgent and emotionally unguarded.^[3] The comparisons that have been drawn range from early Karen O to the Cranberries to Charli XCX, a list that says more about the intensity than about any one sound.^[3]

In "Circling" that intensity is channeled into something slower and more hypnotic than the band's most abrasive moments. The album has plenty of crashing catharsis, but here the effect comes from accumulation. Each return of the refrain asks the voice to carry more, and the performance responds by sounding less steady and more committed. Margolin has said she aims to be vulnerable, emotional, and unapologetic in her songs,^[4] and this track puts that aim in plain view.

The video and the public face of a private song

The video for the single, directed by Rachel Winton, Ben Cole, and Tash Lever, places Margolin on the top deck of a double-decker bus, singing directly into the camera.^[2] A bus is an apt setting. It is a public space that is also a kind of limbo, a place where people travel without arriving, absorbed in their own heads while strangers sit nearby.

There is something quietly funny and moving about performing a song of private self-persuasion in a place so ordinary. It suggests that these moments of bargaining with one's own mind happen everywhere, on commutes and in waiting rooms, rarely seen by anyone. The song makes them audible.

Other ways to hear it

Because Margolin prefers not to spell things out, so that listeners can take from the songs whatever they need,^[4] "Circling" supports more than one reading. The most literal is the one she offers herself: a person managing distress by repeating that all is well.

A second reading hears the song as being about a relationship or situation that cannot be left. The circling is then a pattern of return, the way a person can keep coming back to something painful while telling themselves each time that it is acceptable. The sea imagery fits here too, since tides do not choose to return.

A third reading is gentler. Repeating a hopeful statement may not be self-deception at all, but a kind of practice. On this view the song is closer to a ritual than a confession, an exercise in building belief through habit. Margolin's own description of the album as a search for hope inside sad things leaves room for that interpretation.^[4] The song does not say whether the mantra works. It only shows someone insisting, and that insistence can be heard as courage as readily as fear.

What the song refuses to say

One of the quiet strengths of "Circling" is how little it explains. There is no scene-setting, no named cause for the distress, no tidy story of what went wrong. The song gives the listener the feeling and withholds the backstory, which is consistent with Margolin's stated wish not to over-explain.^[4]

That restraint makes the song portable. A listener can bring a breakup, a bad year, a health scare, or simply an ordinary Tuesday of dread to it, and the refrain will fit. The sea gives the feeling a shape (large, indifferent, recurring), and the waltz gives it a rhythm, but the reason is left blank on purpose.

It also explains why the track works so well beside the rest of the record. Every Bad is full of songs in which a feeling is pushed until it breaks open. "Circling" is the version in which the feeling is pushed until it simply goes around, and the lack of a breaking point is its own kind of tension.

Why it resonates

Plenty of songs describe anxiety. Fewer reproduce its form. "Circling" does not just tell the listener about a loop of reassurance; it puts the listener inside the loop, and holds them there long enough to feel the tide turn from comfort to strain and back again.

Released in March 2020, just as much of the world was being sent indoors to wait and worry, the song also arrived in a moment when many people were learning how it feels to repeat that things will be okay and hope for the best. Nothing about its writing was tied to that moment, but its timing gave it an unplanned extra resonance for anyone listening in isolation.

The result is a song that offers neither easy optimism nor despair. It offers the effort itself. The reassurance may be uncertain and the waves may keep coming, but the voice keeps going, and the music keeps turning, and for a few minutes the circling becomes something shared rather than something endured alone.