Lilac

There is a particular kind of song that works like a pep talk delivered through gritted teeth. “Lilac” is one of them. It begins in a hush, gathers itself over several minutes, and ends in a chant that sounds less like a chorus than a vow, repeated until the singer seems to be convincing herself as much as anyone listening.

Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin has built much of her catalogue on that move: take one small, plain idea and say it again and again until it changes shape. In “Lilac” the idea is simple and enormous. It is a wish to become a gentler person, and to be treated gently in return.

Where the song comes from

Margolin came to music late and without much training. She has said she began learning guitar and writing songs around eighteen or nineteen, after moving to Brighton, where a friend pushed her toward open mic nights^[2]. Georgie Stott, who would later play keyboards in the band, talked her into a first proper gig at a local festival, and the rest of the group formed out of that circle of friends^[2].

The band’s early records were lo-fi and homemade. By the time of the second album, Every Bad, Porridge Radio had become a bigger, more polished proposition, and a signing to the label Secretly Canadian arrived alongside the release of “Lilac” as a single in December 2019^[5][8]. It was the last of three singles before the album, and it carried the band out of Brighton’s DIY scene toward a wider audience^[8].

The video, directed by El Hardwick, places Margolin on a beach^[6]. That setting is no accident. She has described living a few minutes from the sea in Brighton as a formative influence on her writing, a presence that is frightening and soothing at once, one that makes her feel small and fragile yet somehow affirmed^[2].

She has also said the song grew out of one particular relationship, even if she writes in a way that lets listeners hear something broader^[2]. That tension, between a specific situation and a feeling anyone can borrow, runs through the whole album.

A method built on repetition

To understand “Lilac” you have to understand how Margolin writes. She starts from a concrete situation and boils it down to its core feeling. Then she repeats that feeling, screaming it, whispering it, flattening it into a monotone, and lets the repetition do the work^[2]. She talks about a short phrase as a kind of cell, something to be examined under different conditions until it reveals what it contains^[2].

This is why the song’s final stretch lands so hard. A session write-up from XPN noted that “Lilac” shows off her fondness for a mantra-like coda at the end of a composition^[7]. The words themselves are not elaborate. Their force comes from accumulation, the way a sentence said fifty times stops being information and becomes a physical act.

Listeners sometimes compare this to prayer, or to the self-talk people use in a bad moment: breathe, be kind, do better. Margolin’s version is not serene. It is ragged and a little desperate, which is exactly why it reads as sincere.

Bitterness, and the refusal of it

Thematically, the song sits on a fork. One path leads toward hardening, toward becoming a person who has been hurt so many times that cynicism feels like armor. The other path leads toward softness, which is riskier. The narrator keeps choosing the second path out loud, as though saying it were the only way to make it true.

The Line of Best Fit picked out exactly this in its review of the album. The critic described the song as one of the record’s most affecting moments, built on a hope to avoid growing bitter and to grow better instead, with kindness extended inward as well as outward^[3]. The reviewer admitted the sentiment is familiar, but argued that the band’s noise, which swells, builds and collapses around the voice, gives it fresh emotional weight^[3].

That point matters. Plenty of songs promise self-improvement. Few of them sound like the effort costs something. Here the arrangement keeps threatening to tip over, and the vocal keeps pulling it back, so the listener hears the struggle and not only the resolution.

Kindness toward the self

It is easy to hear the song as a plea directed at another person, and the relationship origin supports that reading. But Margolin has framed it more widely. She has said it reflects her wish for people to be kinder to themselves and to each other, and that she writes in order to find the good in hard things^[1].

The inward direction is the more striking one. A lot of indie rock treats self-loathing as a pose or a punchline. Margolin treats it as a real condition, one that needs active, repeated, almost stubborn counter-pressure. The song is less a declaration of recovery than a description of the work recovery requires.

This links the track to the album’s wider concerns. Margolin has said she only noticed the shared threads a week after release: depression, empathy, and the sea^[2]. “Lilac” touches all three. It looks at low moods without wallowing, it extends sympathy outward, and it carries the sense of a body of water that can wash a person clean or swallow them.

Where it sits on Every Bad

Every Bad arrived on 13 March 2020, on the eve of the first pandemic lockdowns, and earned near-universal praise, including a Metacritic score of 86 and a Mercury Prize nomination^[4]. Margolin has called the album an unfinished sentence, and said she likes that the title does not resolve into an answer^[1]. She has described its aim as finding hope inside difficult, sad and hard experiences^[1].

Within that frame, “Lilac” is the album’s emotional centre of gravity. Songs on either side tear at relationships and at the self, but this is the place where the record states what it is for. It does not claim the hurt is solved. It claims that the hope is worth shouting.

The pandemic gave the song an unexpected second life. Stereogum reported that it became a crowd anthem at a London benefit show for a food bank, with a room full of people singing the closing chant back at the stage^[1]. A song about wanting to be gentler turned out to suit a moment when gentleness was in short supply.

The sound of an argument with yourself

Musically, the track is a study in controlled escalation. It opens with space around the voice, so that every small breath and wobble is audible. Instruments enter one at a time, each adding weight, until the arrangement is pushing against the limits of what the song can hold.

That shape mirrors the emotional logic of the lyrics. A quiet wish gets louder because it is not being believed. By the time the band is at full volume, the volume itself has become part of the argument: if the words are shouted, perhaps they will stick.

It is worth noticing how little the song resolves. There is no bridge where the narrator gets better, no verse that reports success. The climb is the content, and the end of the track feels less like arrival than like a fresh start at the bottom of the same hill.

Margolin’s voice does much of the storytelling here. It moves between a dry, almost conversational delivery and a raw shout, and the shift between the two registers is where the song’s vulnerability lives. Nothing is polished into prettiness, and that rawness is part of why the plea sounds earned.

A band at a turning point

The song also arrived at a hinge moment for Porridge Radio. They had spent years as a word-of-mouth favourite in a seaside city, and the move to a larger label brought both a bigger budget and bigger expectations. “Lilac” served as a calling card, showing that the band’s homemade intensity could survive a cleaner studio sound^[8]. Their follow-up album, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, appeared in 2022 on the same label, and the group announced in early 2025 that it would wind down after final tours^[9].

Other ways to hear it

Not everyone hears the track as hopeful. Some listeners take the repeated vow as evidence that the narrator is nowhere near the person she wants to be, and the insistence as a sign of how fragile the resolve is. On that reading, the chant is not triumph but white-knuckling.

Others hear it as communal. Because the phrase is so plain, a crowd can adopt it without strain, and the song becomes something closer to a shared promise than a private confession. The benefit-show anecdote supports this idea.

Margolin herself has declined to nail it down. She has said she avoids over-explaining her songs so that people can take what they need from them^[1]. The open ending suits a writer who thinks of her own album as an unfinished sentence.

Why it endures

“Lilac” lasts because it is honest about how unglamorous change is. Nobody becomes kinder in a single burst of insight. They do it by saying the intention, failing, and saying it again. The song’s structure enacts that cycle, and its dynamics, from near-whisper to full-throated roar, show how much feeling can fit inside a very small idea.

It also lives comfortably in several scenes at once: the bedroom-pop confessional, the anthemic British indie tradition, the intense noise-inflected end of post-punk. Few songs of its era moved so easily between them without losing their centre.

In the end, the song asks for something modest and nearly impossible, which is to be less cruel, to oneself first. Its answer is not a plan but a mantra. Say it until you can mean it, and then say it some more.