Porter Robinson returned in January with his first new song under his own name since his astonishing 2014 debut album Worlds. After a detour into ’90s rave music under the name Virtual Self, Robinson began building on Worlds’ brightly glowing, orchestrally infused video-game pop epics with “Get Your Wish,” the lead single from new album Nurture. But as he explained in a video message today, the real beginning of the Nurture process was “Something Comforting,” his new song out today.

In the message, Robinson referred to the prolonged creative struggle he went through in the years after Worlds. “I was trying for hundreds of hours a week to make something new,” he said, “and trying so many new ideas, and just feeling unhappy with everything, feeling really, really critical of everything that I was doing, and just feeling like nothing was good enough, and just at the absolute creative low point. And I was really beginning to question whether or not I would ever be able to make music again. And that was a very scary thought to me.”

In 2015, when he came up with the instrumental fill that would eventually appear 1:06 into “Something Comforting,” Robinson perked up. “That was the very first thing that I knew I was going to keep,” he explained. “And I’ve probably listened to it like 10,000 times, maybe more. I would just listen to it obsessively because I was like, ‘This is good enough. This is my taste. This is my shit.'” He said he wouldn’t end up completing a song for Nurture for another three years, and it took him nearly five to finish “Something Comforting.” But it’s finally ready now, and it’s gorgeous, so dive in below.

about 'Something Comforting': pic.twitter.com/HmKiM7AMUk

— porter robinson (@porterrobinson) March 10, 2020

Nurture is out this year via Mom + Pop.