Porcelain

“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.” 

Pike’s lyrics were written during a heavy year for him. “In 2025 I had gone through a lot. I was just experiencing a whole lot of loss and life changes very rapidly, in quick succession. The only way for me to process it was to write.” Much of the record’s fire comes from the demoralizing, debilitating experience of life in the USA in 2026. The title track, for example, is a simmering, seething cut interspersed with a Fugazi-esque twin guitar line and a gruff vocal performance by Pike. It’s based on his experience of losing his grandmother while working punishing shifts mixing live sound at SXSW, unable to take time off to feel his grief. “I felt like I was going insane while mixing live sound for crowds of drunk tourists and concert-goers, all while trying to put on a face that I was keeping it together,” he says. “I had to push everything down until I couldn’t feel anything anymore, until I went numb.”

Similarly, the wired “Shotgun”, which breaks down into a chaotic extended noise section followed by a long, patient outro, deals with the emotional labor that is asked of us as workers as we sell our physical labor: “Is the time I have my own?” Pike asks. Meanwhile, the ferocious DSD can be considered a sister song to “Torch,” a track from the 7” the band released earlier in the year. That one was about the helpless feeling of witnessing the horrific genocide in Gaza from a phone screen; “DSD,” meanwhile, confronts horrors on home turf, as ICE forces in Minneapolis carried out extrajudicial executions. “How can you say to me that I must go on when I look out at a world that’s gone?” Pike demands.

The songs which deal with more internal conflict are no less confronting. Opening track “Yarn” is muscular and imposing, and Pike’s vocals are pleading and ragged, as he articulates the shock and numbness of a relationship’s sudden ending; the discordant, urgent “New Sex” meditates on masculinity and sexual politics. Penultimate track “Scene From a Living Room” is the most unique moment on the record, a hushed acoustic ballad that reflects on the painful mundanities of a separation. 

“What has always appealed to me is music that touches on a very human level, that’s very real and very tangible,” Pike says. “And it expands across many genres too — whether it’s folk music, blues, rock, punk, whatever. As long as there’s a human element involved, that’s what inspires me to write, especially on this record. The whole point of music for me is to connect with other people.” 

On the final track “Closure,” across almost nine minutes, the band offers by turns a quiet, slow meditation and an explosive, cathartic release, while Pike summons a vision of hope amid the personal and societal turmoil that he’s documented across the record. “I will live through this apocalypse,” he vows. “I always try to instill a little bit of hope in there, and [recognize] the endurance of the human spirit,” Pike says. “That’s kinda the overall message, at least from my point of view, of the record. It’s like, here’s a lot of heavy subjects that we all deal with in our day to day lives, and it’s what makes us human. Grief and loss is a very human thing that we all experience at some point, whether we like it or not. And to be able to process and connect with other people through it is really important.” Today’s Minor Victories suggests that it’s only by feeling the rage and the pain — igniting it and letting it burn its way through the bullshit — that we find true connection, and maybe forge a path through.