Written by Delphine Winton
I started listening to Porter Robinson when I was sixteen. I was a huge fan of the Dungeons and Dragons podcast The Adventure Zone, and host and DM Griffin McElroy, who also composes the music for the podcast, cited Porter Robinson’s Worlds as one of his inspirations for part of the campaign. I had fallen so hard for this podcast that I immediately went to go listen to Worlds, and was pulled into the universe that Robinson created on that album immediately. Worlds was like nothing I had ever heard before. I was raised on the music of George Frideric Handel and Paul Simon, and on my own, I had explored the worlds of divorced dad music (Bright Eyes) and gay teenager music (Hayley Kiyoko). Worlds was expansive; its soaring synths and ambitious subject matter enchanted me. When his next project Nurture came out in 2021, it felt like a breath of fresh air, and I once again fell in love, notably with the danceability of “Musician”, the earnestness of “Look At The Sky”, and the pitch-shifted vocals that slip in and out throughout the album. Robinson has been very open about the creative block he went through between the releases of World and Nurture, though. He’s essentially been a public figure since the age of 18, when his song “Say My Name” garnered attention from the dance music world. From there, he released his first EP, Spitfire, then “Language”, a song with a notably different sound. Worlds was released in 2014, and then Robinson hit a wall. He still released music - “Shelter” with Madeon, some music under the Virtual Self moniker, but it would be seven years before Robinson’s next release, Nurture.
All of this background is vital for understanding his newest project, Smile :D, an album dealing with fandom, creation, and being a person who is very much in the public eye. It deftly jumps from tone to tone, sometimes ironically funny, sometimes dripping in self-depreciation, sometimes earnestly proclaiming its love for Robinson’s listeners.
First and foremost, Smile :D is an absurdly fun album. Robinson learned how to play guitar after the release of Nurture, citing a desire to create “a Killers record”, but he came out the other end with an album brighter, more colourful, and more drenched in irony (but somehow more sincere) than anything he had created before. Smile :D is as tongue-in-cheek (“Wouldn’t know how to brush my teeth without asking my team” / “Don’t kill yourself, you idiot”) as it is sincere (“I’ve been trying to change but I don’t know how to change you” / “I guard my soft mind, ‘cause I have to”), pulling off this juxtaposition with a deftness that not every artist could.
The album splits the difference between a lot of things, too — genre-wise it’s heading in the direction of indie rock, is not quite keyed-up enough to be hyperpop, and is too acoustic to be EDM. It lives in the middle of genres, perfectly situated to get its ideas across. For example, “Knock Yourself Out” and “Russian Roulette” make incredible use of their crushed-out hooks. Moreover, the synth line in “Cheerleader” is addictive to the point that I listened to it 250 times this year, according to my Spotify Wrapped. The song is equal parts funny and heartfelt, perfectly straddling the line that Smile :D embraces. The wry self-deprecation of “Kitsune Maison Freestyle” (“Ugly pretty boy on the cover”) almost masks the crushing feeling of hearing the reality of our beauty-obsessed society stated so plainly in lyrics like “Everybody’s just trying to look good, trying not to feel bad,” and “Everything you thought you wanted was made out of nothing.”
The back half of the album takes on a softer tone, but isn’t without its higher energy moments. The end of “Mona Lisa” is the song equivalent of smashing into a wall, sparing absolutely nothing from the vocals to the drums to the instrumentation. “Is There Really No Happiness” has some of the most beautiful lyrics Robinson has ever written — he tends towards plainly stated truths, but that song proves that he can get metaphorical when he wants to, pulling in imagery that’s equal parts nostalgic and fantastical.
The most stark example of Robinson’s growth as an artist is at his live shows. The Smile :D tour has a lot of production elements, but they’re in support of Robinson’s performance instead of overshadowing it. There are, at times, overpowering levels of the colour pink. There’s a giant blow-up cat. There’s an incredibly competent live band. There are three separate sections, plus an encore. It’s excess that allows you to indulge without feeling guilty, invoking the same feeling that much of Robinson’s music does. His songs seem to appeal to everyone from ravers to anime fans, to League of Legends players to hardcore kids (if the circle pit that formed at the second Toronto show is anything to go by). Robinson knows how to connect with a crowd, and the amount of time he’s poured into performing live gets to shine.
You can most clearly feel the love that was poured into the album in the closer, “Everything To Me”. The album takes a playful tone with the idea of parasocial relationships, but “Everything To Me” drops that humour entirely in favour of a genuinely heartfelt piece about Robinson’s love for playing shows and his time spent not just in the public eye, but creating art that connects with people.
In the end, that’s the juxtaposition within Smile :D. Robinson isn’t famous with nothing to show for it - he’s gotten to where he is now because his music genuinely means a lot to so many people, and that’s certainly something that’s worthy of an album.
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