Tyears ago, Porter Robinson was on top of the world. When he wasn’t playing clubs on all continents or festivals, he was behind the decks in Las Vegas, where he had his own residence. While his friends were smashing books and doing kegs in college, he was on tour with dance music demigods Tiësto and Skrillex. He became the first artist to be signed to the latter’s label, and even cracked the UK Top 10 with ‘Language’ – the upbeat party anthem from his first EP, which had so much traffic on its release that it crashed. the popular EDM website Beatport. All this and he was only 21 years old.
Robinson was on the verge of having it all. Dance music, once considered a European niche, was finally landing on the shores of mainstream America, and Robinson was among those on its frontier. Then, seemingly overnight, he threw it away. “It sounds dramatic, but it was like a switch,” Robinson, now 31, tells me from his home in North Carolina. “I was on stage in Australia and I started going out of tune. I was drunk and felt zero passion for what I was doing. I went back to my manager and told him I couldn’t keep doing it, that it had to stop… I had a bit of a meltdown.”
It’s been a long time since Robinson DJed, but the prefix has stuck as prefixes tend to do. Now, he hopes to shake it up for good with his new album SMILE! :HEY, an unabashed pop record that’s ever so bombastic and vulnerable. The album, which was unfinished after a previous release leaked in 2018, saw people trade tracks online for bitcoin, continues the move away from his EDM roots – a pivot that began in 2014 with his glittering debut. Of the world and continued on 2021’s ambient-pop outing Upbringing. Lead single ‘Cheerleader’ is a starburst of indie pop-punk, like a pair of busted Doc Martens walking through a field of balloons filled with rainbow confetti.
There’s also a hint of 2010s emo, and more guitar ballads than you’d think – a direct result of Robinson learning to play a few years ago. Only then did he start listening to Radiohead, Coldplay and The Killers. Even ‘Mr Brightside’ had passed him. “No, really,” Robinson laughs at my arched eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of it before – no one believes me!”
In conversation, Robinson is articulate and thoughtful. The answers often end up in unexpected places, with an apologetically mumbled “I don’t know how we got here” offered as an addendum. But the destination is just as interesting as the origin. The same goes for his career: a series of musical hairpin turns that show a restless artist who can’t stand still for long, distracted by a new thing glinting out of the corner of his eye.
Having grown up in a happy family in North Carolina, Robinson counts the internet as a third parent. “Going to church and sports and hanging out with my friends at school, the family computer became that beacon for me,” he says. “I was living on autopilot until the internet, honestly.”
Robinson, dyed black, features two longer blunt sections that fall like harsh curtains on either side of his face. Your average person might call it a mullet, but a certain crowd will recognize the look as a “hime” haircut, a Japanese style popularized by J-Drama stars and anime. He is easy to talk to and quick to smile. Robinson’s teeth (not his own) appear on the album as he despairs over an earlier decision to get veneers. “It makes me cry thinking I can never reverse it,” he says now, sounding upset, before handing me two rows of perfectly white pearls.
For the first 20 years of his life he only listened to EDM. It started, as many early interests do, because of a colder older brother. “My brother brought home a copy of it Dance Dance Revolution (DDR),” says Robinson, referring to the Japanese game in which players hit floor pads in sync with arrows that zip past a screen at a relentless pace. “It was my first time listening to electronic music and Japanese music and I fell in love.”
It wasn’t long before Robinson was putting together his own DDR pieces using some illegal software he found online. By the time he was 12, Robinson knew his way around an EDM song – both as a fan and as an architect, stacking sounds into a Jenga tower of pleasure, the satisfying collapse triggered by a well-timed bass drop. The genre is often unfairly written off as glorified button mashing, but Robinson knows that the right buttons can create an experience like no other: a sky-waking crescendo to get your heart pumping or a Teutonic bass line to make your head spin to hit
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It was Robinson’s song “Say My Name” that got him noticed by mainstream audiences – including Skrillex who invited him on tour. It felt like the beginning of something new, says Robinson. Together they played venues that had never hosted dance music before. EDM wasn’t even a word yet. “Those days really felt like they were part of history,” he says.
His subterranean interest, however, was now well above ground – and thus, infinitely less interesting to him. “It was turning into this highly commercial, arena-sized thing, which wasn’t what I wanted to do, and the whole EDM festival thing felt really bad,” he says. “I became known for a genre I could no longer vouch for.”
I was trying to be a rock star, but really, I was just drinking to get through the shows
And so, one “breakdown” later, it started working Of the world, his debut album and his first pivot away from EDM. The record, which saw the beatsmiths swap clubs for electro-pop, was a major left turn for Robinson – and he wanted to be recognized as such. “I imagined releasing it and being overnight in a completely different realm,” he says now. “I imagined losing my entire audience at the time, as if I was trying to alienate my enthusiastic fans. There are videos of me berating people in the crowd for bringing rave gear to my shows,” he shudders.
Today, he wishes he had done it with more grace. “I can’t pick up my nose like I used to,” he says. “As long as people are listening, I’m grateful.” Robinson looks back with regret on a video of which he boldly declares EDM to be “not art”. “It was so wrong,” she says. “EDM is clearly art… this video was me trying to get away from something and honestly be a bit of an ad.” At the time he was doing “Clarity” with Zedd. The euphoric bop went down in dance music history as one of his biggest anthems, amassing 574 million streams on Spotify. But at the time, Robinson didn’t want to be associated with it, going so far as to pull his name out of the headlines. (Still gets leftovers from it, though.)
“Around then, I was at the height of my anxiety about not wanting to do EDM,” he says, “…and I wanted to be cool.” Cool was a preoccupation for Robinson back then. On stage, he wore sunglasses and a leather jacket, sipping Gray Goose from the bottle. “I was trying to be a rock star, but really, I was just drinking to get through the shows,” he says. And there was so much to go through: there was a point where Robinson was playing over 200 shows a year.
When Avicii took his own life in 2018, having spoken about his mental suffering because of his work, it was, says Robinson, “a wake-up call for a lot of people”. Robinson is sober these days – something, he jokes, is a cliché in ex-DJ circles. “Almost every DJ that was popular in the 2010s is now super sober,” he says. “You start to break down but then you postpone, like you postpone the pain. Then he hits you all at once.”
That’s all behind him now. His release SMILE! :HEY follows three years from Upbringing, Robinson’s critically acclaimed follow-up album, about how he managed to get out of depression and get back into music. Refreshing themes belie an arduous process, however: Upbringing it took seven years to create, written in a chamber of criticism and adoration, where Robinson found himself paralyzed. “I was crazy worried that I would be viewed negatively or misunderstood,” she says. “I wanted to be as useful and responsible as possible because I wanted to help people in the same position as me and I wanted to be seen as a good person – but as time went on, I realized that I was taking out more and more parts of myself to do that that is until I was left with just this little cartoon character that wasn’t real.” On SMILE, Robinson loosens his grip and finds something closer to the truth. “Even in those cocky jitters, it’s honest,” he smiles. “Because it talks about how I’d like to be.”
‘SMILE! :D’ is out July 26 via MOM+POP
