It’s thrilling when an act pulls it all together to make the album that felt like have always been sitting there inside them, like potential energy practically longing to be made kinetic. Porridge Radio’s 2022 album, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, was a simmering wonder of indie rock. As a follow-up, Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There builds on its predecessor into a tough, soaring symphony of aching angst. It is emotion spread open and made raw.

For the album, the band enlisted producer Dom Monk, who’s worked extensively with Big Thief and Laura Marling. Monk brings the same cathedral vastness to Porridge Radio’s material that distinguishes his strongest collaborations elsewhere, and that sense of scale arouses the group’s creativity. There are instances across the record where it just doesn’t seem to occur to any of the band members that their approach to a song should be confined in any way. “You Will Come Home” starts like a Linda Thompson, post-folk song of tremulous, focused intensity before evolving into a thick rock bellow. The different sonic sides of the tracks seem miles apart and yet tightly intertwined.

Porridge Radio’s frontwoman, Dana Margolin, says she wrote many of these songs while steeping in the sourness of a breakup and generally feeling worn down by life. “Lavender, Raspberries” moves with some of PJ Harvey’s discordant fury as it compounds upon itself until it reaches a level of thumping power, Margolin delivering lyrics jammed with pummeling metaphors: “I am a bumper car, I am a one-way street/ Roofs in the trees, they will always be there for me/ Hear it all night in the way you sing softly/ I am the asphalt, I’ll never die.”

There are fascinating, enrapturing explorations across the album. “A Hole in the Ground” is a hurricane around the eye of Margolin’s focused vocals (“Wash off the dirt, rinse the sand out my eyes/ Leave this fog I’ve been under, a kind of disguise”), and “Pieces of Heaven” spins the formula with synths like something out of a mourning song by Tangerine Dream. The tightening discomfort that characterizes the album’s core feelings is loosened somewhat by the closer, the cacophonously triumphant “Sick of the Blues.” Emphasizing her rejuvenation, Margolin pares down her lyrics to clear, sharp statements, repeatedly singing, “Oh, I’m sick of the blues/ I’m in love with my life again/ I’m sick of the blues/ I’m in love.”

The is no real reinvention of Porridge Radio’s art on Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There. There is a newfound strength and potency to it, though. They approach perfection, at the very least. Sometimes when I listen, I swear they might in fact touch it.