While Aaron Maine talks about the new Porches album Shirt over Zoom, the audio lags, his digitized voice disembodied and misaligned with his video as he lies in bed. It feels like a perfect metaphor for the off-kilter aura of the songs, the glitchy discomfort that makes them alluring. Shirt doesn’t arrive until September, but the compelling singles “Rag,” “Joker,” and “Itch” are enough to prove this thrillingly strange atmosphere. It’s a big leap from his previous material — his strongest stuff yet.

Porches has evolved since Pool, his 2016 sophomore album, which earned critical acclaim for its electronic flourishes and pleasant minimalism and turned Maine into a staple of New York indie music. Shirt expands on the restless, experimental sound that was explored on his 2021 LP All Day Gentle Hold ! while also introducing harsher, noisier textures at unexpected times. Mostly, though, Shirt abounds with eerie moments. Maine likens “School,” a ballad that falls in the middle of the album, to Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. It strikes the balance of “super beautiful and kind of creepy” as he lulls, “Anything could happen if you want it to.” The chords are delicate and sinister, following his lead as he repeatedly declares that promise. On “Sally,” Maine intones, “Sally’s in the yard/ Sally’s in the shed/ Sally grabs a tool/ Sally hits my head.” The nursery rhyme builds tension before frenzied guitars crash in for the chorus right as Maine sings, “The bird takes a shit on my head/ Now we will never be apart again.”

“It’s like all your wildest dreams come true and the bird shitting on your head was your luck happening and you get anything you want,” Maine says of the lyric. “It’s preceded by a pigeon just taking shit.” Has a bird shit on his head before? “It’s definitely happened a bunch of times.” A bunch of times? “Maybe like five times in my life,” he clarifies at my perplexity. “Maybe that’s why I’m so lucky.”

On July 25, Porches will play an intimate solo set for The Wild Honey Pie & Stereogum’s Pizza Party at Stonehill’s in Accord, NY — get your tickets here and join us there! Until then, read on for a chat with Maine about how Nine Inch Nails, weed, childhood, and more shaped Shirt.

Nine Inch Nails

AARON MAINE: I was listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails for the first time in my life, like digging a little deeper into them and I was listening to The Fragile, which I think is their third record. I was sort of trying to make this hypergrunge record in my head and I was just super inspired and took a lot of cues from the Nine Inch Nails production as far as taking these familiar sounds, these typical live rock band distorted guitars, acoustic drums, and electric bass and flipping them on their head and glitching them out. My goal was to have them reminiscent of a live rock band but totally chopped up and a little alarming and overly saturated to get this unsettled yet familiar feeling with the productions, so that was definitely an inspiration.

It took a lot of experimenting and trial and error. At one point, the album sort of turned into this sound design, sci-fi piece that was unlistenable, like there was so much going on. I just probably had been listening to it way too much and every three seconds some other crazy sound would come in. So I spent a lot of time going back and muting a lot of the sound design stuff that I worked on and try to pare it back down to something super digestible that wasn’t too unnecessarily complicated.

I haven’t heard the term before “hypergrunge” before.

MAINE: I’m hoping that I coined it. I hope that it doesn’t get pigeonholed into this thing, because that wasn’t the only thought. But I wanted to make a record that was reminiscent of all the sounds would be familiar, but it is 2024 and sort of pushed myself on the production side to take that idea further because I want to always be making something fresh and new and exciting, mainly just for me to stay interested and inspired. It just felt modern and a good thing to aim for. I like the idea of grunge and the rock music that I grew up listening to and also diving deep into the editing process and twisting it on its head. I feel like there’s a lot of anxiety running through the record and a lot of opposites that I tried to pit towards each other in the same song or songs next to each other to create this feeling of anxiety that I guess I was feeling at that time.

I do feel like I stuck to the plot. It’s sort of a challenging record at times. I feel like some of the Porches stuff really goes down easy and it’s sugary and peaceful on the ears. And this was sort of a departure from that, which I feel like I needed, something more kind of urgent, and maybe confrontational at times.

But none of that stuff is ever conscious decision. In reality, the best stuff comes out when I go into autopilot mode and it just starts happening and I know when it’s right and I know when it’s wrong. I sort of have to look back at it to parse out what was going on or listen to it to see how I was feeling.

Nirvana

MAINE: I think it’s probably pretty obvious that I was listening to Nirvana a lot throughout the process. I think mainly the In Utero record was really inspiring, a little bit melodically but more vocal performance-wise. I wanted to push my vocal performance and the lyrics to a point that I hadn’t before, and I felt kind of freer and braver. I wanted to take some risks in that sense and push myself further and kind of let it feel unhinged. If it was feeling like it was going over the top, rather than tame it, allow it to go fully over the top.

Touring All Day Gentle Hold !

MAINE: As far as inspiration pillars for this record, a big one was touring off of last album, All Day Gentle Hold ! That was pretty post-COVID, sort of the first live performances we had done since wondering if that was ever gonna be a possibility again. That felt really victorious and super blissed out, and I feel like the band was on fire. We started to play the songs really loud and cranking up the guitars. I was pushing my voice and screaming some of the heavier songs. That felt kind of liberating and I feel like the audience really responded to that energy. So that was a lot of what informed how I wanted this album to feel and how I was imagining it would feel to play live and to hear live. I think that’s where this heaviness and rawness came from. Trying to kind of have a higher intensity, more unhinged.

Working In A Windowless Basement

MAINE: I started renting this basement rehearsal space studio for the first time and I think I was really able to get lost and go deeper into these songs and into my psyche, like weirdo freak zone. There’s no windows, and I really would go down there for like eight hours and come out with spirals in my eyes and that felt good and precarious and definitely weird to tap into some prickly bits inside me down there. I guess I was just feeling the general manicness and ups and downs and trying to wrestle with them all and be as honest with myself as I could. A lot of the time I feel both things at the same time. There’s a lot of contradictions going on in my head, which I guess can lead to being contradictory or on edge or confused or hyper-emotional or something like that.

I don’t think there was one particular thing I was feeling. I do think part of it was the setting, being alone, just a place where I could be with my deepest and darkest thoughts and spend time with them uninterrupted and explore what that sounded like in a song.

Childhood

MAINE: I don’t know if it’s totally audible to the listener, but a lot of the album came from these childlike experiences and scenarios with these suburban pillars, like fences and trees and dirt and girls and kicking and hitting, sort of scrappy adolescent fantasies of mine, all very abstract, obviously. I think when I was entering into these songs, there was part of me that feels like I was trying to relive — not relive that time in my life but that almost feels like where my vantage point was from. I think through that vantage point with my current lens as an adult, I was almost rewriting these childhood fantasies with my 34-year-old brain and reckoning with them and realizing that they weren’t so innocent and injecting this innocence lost into these innocent moments of my past or something. It’s almost like another pitting these kinds of things together that are at odds and seeing what happens or what that sounds like and what that feels like.

Why do you think that you’re reflecting on childhood now in your life?

MAINE: I don’t know. Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis or something. It’s just an unbelievable state of mind that you’re in at that age. For whatever reason, I was drawn to that. I feel like that’s the root — that wonder and awe and confusion and hyper-emotions and you’re the center of your own universe. Everything is so heightened at that age.

I feel like that’s when I’m at my best — when I’m feeling things like I did when I was 14 or 15 years old or something like that. The scenery around where I grew up was really inspiring, the nature and the characters. I didn’t necessarily feel comfortable, it honestly felt a little more demented to go back there and reevaluate or reassess these kinds of scenarios. It all just made sense and I was just sort of there to capture it and make a record about it in some capacity.

Weed

MAINE: I was smoking a lot of weed for the first time.

For the first time?

MAINE: I’ve never really been able to smoke more than like a puff of weed. If I smoke more, I get totally panicked and paranoid and feel like I’m gonna pass out. But I felt kind of safe in this basement and shielded from the world. It sort of puts you in this precarious emotional state where you’re open and a little more porous and fragile and sensitive to these thoughts. I was up for the task and the challenge of putting myself in a vulnerable place to navigate newer things. I would feel existential dread or fears and panic and sort of get a hold on those things and I felt like I was learning a different set of tools to find my way around being too high and tender. That was an inspiring thing to be in that space and maybe that’s where some of the anxiety on the record comes from — being up against these broader, more overwhelming gusts of emotion of being stoned.

What was the existential dread that you were feeling?

MAINE: Just that the world is the most demonic, terrifying rock spinning into complete disaster and violence and evil and war and humanity and death and global warming and America and the water and you know what I mean? How short life is, how impossibly significant and insignificant life is at the same time. I feel like I’m just darting back and forth between these poles throughout.

Shirt is out 9/13 on Domino.