Track of the Day: Porches Feat Dev Hynes “rangerover” (2019)

Boundless artist Aaron Maine and his ever-changing Porches project has hooked up with Blood Orange hotshot Dev Hynes for a slinky pop jam named “rangerover”.

Sounding like a mile away from his indie rock past, the jam is perfectly in line with what you’d expect from Hynes, but taken in a new direction thanks to Maine’s grinding vocals which chisel away at this sunset beat with a painful desire to drive away from obsession.

Most notably, Maine has shared an insightful statement about the new direction of Porches, which you can find below.

“I’ve been making music as Porches since 2009. Porches can be a country song, a dance song, a punk song, a pop song or anything in between. It’s an exploration of any sound or idea that I find interesting in that moment, the idea being that these seemingly isolated ideas will become unified in the context of the Porches catalogue. Porches is my love affair with music.
Sometimes you can string words together that don’t make sense literally, but they capture whatever the sentiment is so perfectly that it doesn’t matter. You know when it feels right, and you know when it feels wrong. I try and keep what I make close to home. Sometimes that home is fantasy, sometimes it’s autobiographical, but it’s always a way to interpret my experiences in a way that is intimate to me.

Like any other type of diary, when you open up an old one you can feel all sorts of things: proud, ashamed, excited, mortified, humbled, out of your mind, smart, idiotic. I feel all of these things about Porches.

For as many turns the music has made, I’ve decided to stick to the Porches moniker, to come to terms with and confront my evolution as an artist as well as a person. As clunky as that may be, it comes back to wanting to accept and explore who I am, what I feel, and how I communicate that. I want to swim to the bottom of myself and find the weirdest most special and pure shit that I can offer.

I recently did some Porches shows as a solo act, and while it won’t be the only way I perform live in the future, there is something about going up on stage alone with a laptop or a keyboard that feels more confronting and open to me than showing up with a 5-piece band. I feel nervous and on my toes like I haven’t in a long time, and when that nervous energy works for me, it can really transform the performance into something exciting. It’s just you and the audience, it’s very intimate, it’s very visceral, it’s very revealing. I feel you have a short time on this planet, and I’m interested in connecting with people, and exploring the different ways you can do that.

Music keeps me alive and I hope that by continuing to make and release it, I can make some people laugh, cry, fall in love, lose their shit, smile, run around, and most importantly help them to feel alive for a brief moment.”

Chris Singh

Chris Singh is an Editor-At-Large at the AU review, loves writing about travel and hospitality, and is partial to a perfectly textured octopus. You can reach him on Instagram: @chrisdsingh.