The Minneapolis five-piece went from karaoke-night beginnings to millions of views, festival stages and sold-out shows remarkably quickly. But with the beautifully unhinged “Under” and a debut album on the horizon, Porch Light are discovering that the messiest, loudest and most embarrassingly honest version of themselves might also be the truest one.
There are plenty of respectable ways to record the climactic vocals for one of the heaviest songs you’ve ever made.
You could rest your voice.
Drink some tea.
Warm up.
Dim the lights.
Center yourself.
Or, if you’re Porch Light’s Jackie Uhas, you can wait until the final night of a ten-day recording session, watch the Timberwolves, drink a few beers and a shot of Jameson, stumble into the bathroom, write the bridge on the toilet, walk back into the studio five minutes later and scream the thing into existence.
Nobody—including producer Caleb Hinz—really knew what was about to happen.
Maybe that was the point.
The resulting song, “Under,” is Porch Light deliberately attempting to make something capable of causing physical damage to a small venue.
“Full transparency, we just really wanted to make a face-melting song I could scream on,” Jackie says.
Mission accomplished.
But underneath the distortion, urgency and mosh-pit ambitions is an idea that feels increasingly central to the Minneapolis five-piece:
Maybe perfection is overrated.
“Seeking perfection in any artistic medium will consistently leave you disappointed,” Jackie tells MUNDANE. “There’s an art to letting go.”
For a band experiencing the kind of acceleration Porch Light has seen, letting go might be particularly useful.
Songs like “Oxygen” and “Fall Back” began traveling online before many of the people discovering Porch Light had ever stood in the same room as them. Social media brought millions of eyes toward five twenty-somethings from Minneapolis whose songs sounded simultaneously intimate enough for headphones and large enough to scream back from a crowd.
Then the internet started becoming real life.
Sold-out shows.
Touring.
Lollapalooza.
Shaky Knees.
A first major North American headline run.
And, looming behind all of it, a debut album designed to show that Porch Light is considerably harder to summarize than a handful of viral songs might suggest.
The internet might have introduced them.
But the stage is where they make sense.
Porch Light Was Never Supposed to Be Quiet
“We have always considered Porch Light to be a very live-sounding band,” bassist Henry Hughes says.
That description becomes important when you understand how the group actually creates.
They jam.
A lot.
Songs aren’t necessarily born from somebody arriving with a perfectly organized demo and handing everyone their assignment.
The five musicians play together until something starts happening.
“We write so much through playing live,” Henry says. “I really feel like the audience can feel that as soon as we step onto a stage.”
That relationship between the room and the song became particularly important with “Under.”
Porch Light had just come home from touring when they entered the studio.
The physical memory of playing for crowds was still there.
The adrenaline hadn’t quite left.
And rather than trying to calm it down, they followed it.
“I think something like ‘Under’ has always been in the back of everyone’s mind, kind of waiting to make its debut,” Henry explains. “We had just got off the road when we got into the studio and we were still riding off the energy a crowd can give you.”
So they wrote for that crowd.
Not abstractly.
Physically.
A song for bodies colliding.
A song for sweat.
A song where Jackie’s voice didn’t politely float above the guitars but fought its way through them.
It became an essential piece of the upcoming album because it captured something the band was discovering about itself in real time.
Porch Light could hit harder.
Perfection Is Boring Anyway
Jackie knew exactly how she wanted the vocals on “Under” to feel.
She also knew there was a problem.
She isn’t formally trained to scream without potentially hurting her voice.
So she scheduled those vocals last.
If she destroyed her voice, at least everything else would already be recorded.
Practical.
Then came the Timberwolves.
The alcohol.
The bathroom.
The bridge.
And the take.
The story is funny because rock music has spent decades constructing elaborate mythology around spontaneous studio moments, but Jackie’s explanation of what happened afterward is more interesting than the mythology.
“I absolutely believe the best performances come from the rawest, truest moments.”
She is also quick to acknowledge that letting go doesn’t come naturally all the time.
Jackie is hard on herself as a writer.
She revisits things.
Questions decisions.
Imagines what she could change.
Producer Caleb helps pull her back when necessary.
Because eventually there is a point where continuing to “improve” something begins removing whatever made it alive.
“You kind of know when you need to put the pen down.”
That’s a difficult skill.
Particularly when the thing you’re making might live online forever.
But Jackie has started thinking of recordings differently.
They’re timestamps.
Not definitive versions of yourself.
Not proof that you finally achieved perfection.
Just evidence of who you were in that room on that particular day.
“The beauty is in the moment.”
Sometimes the moment happens in a bathroom.
Serve the Song. Serve Your Heart.
The volume of “Under” could easily overwhelm its emotional center.
Porch Light doesn’t let that happen.
Jackie credits the instrumental foundation created by the rest of the band for giving her somewhere to go emotionally.
“I think the guys do a really wonderful job of building out these incredible instrumentals, and I just follow with whatever feels natural.”
Her writing tends toward vulnerability almost automatically.
Songwriting is where things go.
Anxiety.
Uncertainty.
Things that might be uncomfortable to say without guitars surrounding them.
So making a heavier song doesn’t require becoming less emotionally direct.
If anything, the volume gives those feelings somewhere else to live.
“With the heaviest of songs, it’s about serving the song and serving your heart.”
That sentence could probably sit above most of Porch Light’s catalogue.
The band is learning how to make music that hits hard without using intensity to disguise what it’s actually about.
The guitars can explode.
Jackie can scream.
The emotional premise still has to survive underneath.
It Started at Karaoke, Obviously
Porch Light’s origin story sounds suspiciously like something invented for a movie about an indie band.
Zac Fogarty, Henry Hughes, Kyle Siemon and Tony O’Keefe needed a singer.
Then they heard Jackie at karaoke.
So they asked her.
That’s essentially it.
No exhaustive audition process.
No industry matchmaking.
No strategically assembled lineup.
Karaoke.
Looking backward, Henry finds the whole thing increasingly improbable.
“It all feels surreal.”
Not simply because of how quickly the band has grown, but because of how many things had to happen correctly for these particular five people to end up together.
“The stars had to align for all of us to come together when we did.”
The stranger part is that they didn’t merely have musical chemistry.
They discovered they wanted the same thing.
“Our collective vision for this band has never wavered.”
That alignment might be rarer than talent.
Bands contain personalities, ambitions, schedules, insecurities, money, exhaustion and five potentially incompatible definitions of success.
Finding people who can make good music together is one thing.
Finding people who want to take that music in the same direction is another.
“To find a group of people who all want the same things is so rare,” Henry says, “and we definitely didn’t realize that when the band first started.”
They realize it now.
The Internet Heard Them Before It Saw Them
Then came the strange modern part.
The songs escaped.
“Oxygen” connected online on a scale that quickly exceeded the rooms Porch Light had physically played.
“Fall Back” followed that emotional trajectory.
People who had never attended a Porch Light show started forming relationships with songs written by five people they had never met.
For Henry, the reason is relatively uncomplicated.
“When a piece of music or lyric or melody resonates with you, it touches you and you want to follow the journey and know more about it.”
Porch Light got lucky, he says.
But luck only explains distribution.
It doesn’t explain attachment.
“We make music with our hearts on our sleeve and that emotion translates.”
Jackie has seen exactly how far that translation can travel.
Listeners tell the band where songs found them.
What they were going through.
Why a lyric suddenly meant something different inside their own life.
The songwriter writes something intensely personal and sends it outward.
Eventually a stranger sends back an entirely different story.
That’s when the song stops belonging exclusively to the person who wrote it.
Five Twenty-Somethings Playing Their Hearts Out
Porch Light’s music repeatedly circles the instability of being young enough that everything still feels undecided but old enough that you’re expected to have started deciding.
Relationships.
Identity.
Ambition.
The future.
The usual assortment of existential inconveniences.
Henry doesn’t pretend the band has solved any of it.
“We are just five twenty-somethings playing our hearts out every night.”
The show becomes somewhere to temporarily put the anxiety.
“It’s our way of letting go of all that uncertainty.”
Jackie approaches the same idea from the opposite side of the stage.
“I hope the crowd leaves feeling seen and heard.”
That hope comes with vulnerability.
She describes her writing as coming from a “somewhat embarrassingly honest place.”
There is something wonderfully accurate about that phrase.
Real vulnerability is often embarrassing.
The polished version gets called authenticity.
The actual version is sending something deeply personal into the world and immediately wondering why you told everybody that.
“It’s been humbling being so forthcoming with my emotions to such a large audience.”
But then someone tells her a Porch Light song appeared exactly when they needed it.
And embarrassment becomes connection.
Minneapolis Is Still in the Room
The band didn’t emerge in a vacuum.
Minneapolis matters.
Most of the members had played in previous bands or jammed with other musicians around the city.
They grew up going to local shows.
They learned inside a scene where DIY spaces, established venues, musicians and local public radio all form different pieces of the same ecosystem.
“There is an incredible community here that is constantly evolving and inspiring,” Henry says.
That history makes one upcoming show particularly emotional.
Not Lollapalooza.
Not Shaky Knees.
Not Los Angeles.
Not New York.
First Avenue.
Porch Light’s hometown headline show at the Minneapolis institution carries a different weight.
“We all grew up going to shows here and looking up to the bands that made it what it is today,” Henry says. “So to be able to do it ourselves is incredibly special.”
There are milestones that look impressive from outside.
Then there are milestones that mean something because you remember standing in the audience.
First Avenue is the second kind.
The Debut Album Is Going to Complicate Things
If Porch Light’s singles have created an assumption about what the band sounds like, the debut album may be interested in dismantling it.
“It may not seem like it yet, but this album has so much range,” Henry says.
The goal wasn’t to identify the band’s most successful existing sound and reproduce it twelve times.
Instead, Porch Light wanted the record to encompass the different versions of themselves that have already begun appearing.
The vulnerability.
The melody.
The atmospheric moments.
The heavier impulses.
The version capable of making “Under.”
“There would be something for everybody, sort of encompassing all the different sounds we’ve released so far.”
But even that explanation eventually gives way to something less strategic.
“At the end of the day, it really is just seeing what we could do and making music we think is cool.”
There it is.
No grand manifesto required.
Put the Pen Down
Porch Light’s story is moving unusually quickly.
That is exciting.
It’s also dangerous.
When something begins working, there is enormous pressure to understand precisely why it worked and then keep reproducing it.
The internet rewards repetition.
The music industry loves recognizable narratives.
Audiences want more of the thing that first made them care.
Porch Light’s debut album arrives at exactly the moment when the band could easily start overthinking itself.
Instead, “Under” points toward another possibility.
Jam.
Get loud.
Write something because you want to see what happens when people mosh to it.
Save the screaming until the last night.
Write the bridge wherever necessary.
Stop trying to make every moment definitive.
Put the pen down.
Because Porch Light’s most interesting quality isn’t that everything appears to be going right.
It’s that the five of them are willing to admit they don’t know where everything is going.
They’re twenty-somethings.
They’re anxious.
They’re figuring it out.
They’re making songs about it.
And somewhere in Minneapolis, the same people who once stood inside First Avenue watching somebody else’s band are preparing to walk onto that stage themselves.
Maybe that’s why the music connects.
It isn’t offering answers.
It’s offering company.
And sometimes that’s the song you need most.
In Conversation With Porch Light
MUNDANE: Your music has resonated online incredibly quickly, but your live shows seem to be where the band truly comes alive. How has performing in front of real audiences changed the way you think about your songs?
HENRY: We have always considered Porch Light to be a very live-sounding band and wanted our shows to reflect that. We jam together so much and write so much through playing live, and I really feel like the audience can feel that as soon as we step onto a stage.
MUNDANE: “Under” was intentionally written to be your most explosive, mosh pit-ready track. What inspired you to embrace a heavier, more aggressive side of Porch Light, and did it surprise you where the song ultimately ended up?
HENRY: I think that something like “Under” has always been in the back of everyone’s mind, kind of waiting to make its debut, and it just happened to emerge on this project. We had just got off the road when we got into the studio, and we were still riding off the energy a crowd can give you on the road. I think that definitely shaped this song and it being an essential part of the album.
MUNDANE: Jackie, you’ve shared the hilarious story of writing the bridge in a bathroom after a few drinks and recording the vocals immediately afterward. Do you think the best performances sometimes come from letting go of perfection and simply trusting instinct?
JACKIE: Seeking perfection in any artistic medium will consistently leave you disappointed. I find that there’s an art to letting go and allowing things, like music, to speak for themselves. You kind of know when you need to put the pen down.
I find there are always things I look back on and wish I did differently or could change, but the beauty is in the moment. It’s a timestamp of who I was and who we are in that phase of life, or in that studio session.
I tend to be pretty hard on myself about writing, but our producer Caleb balances me out and grounds me when I need it. I absolutely believe the best performances come from the rawest, truest moments.
MUNDANE: There’s an interesting balance in your music between vulnerability and raw intensity. How do you keep emotional honesty at the center of songs that are built to hit as hard as “Under”?
JACKIE: I think the guys do a really wonderful job of building out these incredible instrumentals, and I just follow with whatever feels natural. I tend to lean into my emotional side, as songwriting is my outlet, so the words flow pretty naturally. With the heaviest of songs, it’s about serving the song and serving your heart.
MUNDANE: The band came together in such an unconventional way—meeting Jackie during a karaoke night. Looking back now, does that story still feel surreal, especially considering how quickly everything has taken off?
HENRY: It all feels surreal. Especially looking back and realizing how much the stars had to align for all of us to come together when we did.
Not to mention our collective vision for this band has never wavered. To find a group of people who all want the same things is so rare, and we definitely didn’t realize that when the band first started.
MUNDANE: Songs like “Oxygen” and “Fall Back” connected with millions online before many listeners had even seen you perform live. What have those fans taught you about the emotional impact your music has on people?
HENRY: I think that in today’s world, when a piece of music or lyric or melody resonates with you, it touches you and you want to follow the journey and know more about it.
I think we have been lucky enough to have music that has had that impact on people, and that’s everything to us. We make music with our hearts on our sleeve, and that emotion translates.
MUNDANE: You’re heading into your biggest run of shows yet, including Lollapalooza, Shaky Knees and your first major headlining tour. Is there a particular milestone on this tour that feels especially meaningful for the band?
HENRY: Every step we take feels insane to us, and we are constantly just trying to take everything in.
That being said, one show that is especially important to us is our headline show in Minneapolis at a venue called First Avenue. We all grew up going to shows here and looking up to the bands that made it what it is today, so to be able to do it ourselves is incredibly special.
MUNDANE: Minneapolis has produced so many influential artists across different genres. Has the city’s music scene shaped Porch Light’s identity, or have you always felt like you were carving out your own lane?
HENRY: Minneapolis’ music scene has definitely played a role in what Porch Light is and how we sound. Most of us have been in bands before this or have jammed with other musicians in the area, and going to local shows was a huge part of all of our lives growing up.
There is an incredible community here that is constantly evolving and inspiring. Everything from the DIY scene to the venues to the local public radio. It’s all supported us and helped us become what we are now.
MUNDANE: Your upcoming debut album marks a major turning point. Beyond introducing new songs, what do you hope listeners discover about Porch Light that they haven’t seen through the singles alone?
HENRY: It may not seem like it yet, but this album has so much range. The idea we had was that there would be something for everybody, sort of encompassing all the different sounds we’ve released so far.
But at the end of the day, it really is just seeing what we could do and making music we think is cool.
MUNDANE: Your music often captures the uncertainty of growing up while still carrying an undeniable sense of hope. When fans leave one of your shows, what do you hope stays with them long after the final song ends?
HENRY: We are just five twenty-somethings playing our hearts out every night. It’s our way of letting go of all that uncertainty and anxiety we feel.
JACKIE: I hope the crowd leaves feeling seen and heard. I write from a somewhat embarrassingly honest place. It’s been humbling being so forthcoming with my emotions to such a large audience, but the best reactions we have gotten from our music are about how much it touched people’s souls.
The stories of how the songs found them when they needed them the most. We all have songs in our lives that we feel this way about, but to be giving that to other people is the greatest gift.
It makes the hardships of life that much more worth it to go through and write about.
