Porter Robinson

Since 2010 · United States

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Nurture (2021)

Nurture is Porter Robinson's most intimate record, built during a period of serious creative block and shaped by that struggle as much as by any specific production idea. "Musician" turns the anxiety of being unable to make music into the actual subject of a song, its bright, layered production working almost as a rebuttal to the despair the lyrics describe. "Look at the Sky" and "Something Comforting" show the same vulnerability applied to more directly hopeful material. It's a record that trades the scale of festival-circuit electronic music for something closer to a diary, and it's widely regarded as the fullest realization yet of the more personal direction he set out on with Worlds.

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Porter Robinson

Nurture · 2021

Porter Robinson began his career as a teenager within the mainstream EDM and complextro scene of the early 2010s, scoring festival-circuit success before growing openly dissatisfied with the genre's conventions. Worlds (2014) marked a deliberate turn away from that world, trading big-room drops for more melodic, emotionally layered electronic music influenced by anime soundtracks, video games, and the shoegaze and dream-pop records he'd grown up on.

His Virtual Self project (2017) took a different detour, reviving the sound of late-'90s and early-2000s trance and hardcore rave music with a mix of genuine reverence and critical distance. Nurture (2021), made partly during a period of serious creative block, pulled back further from dance-music convention toward something closer to intimate, singer-songwriter-adjacent electronic pop, and was widely treated as his most personal and fully realized record. Robinson has continued to build a devoted following through both his music and large-scale virtual and live events built around it.