Aaron Maine has always had a complicated relationship with rock’n’roll. In the early 2010s, his band Porches crystallized around unsteady and unsettled guitar music fit for the scrappy DIY venues and dingy basements he often played across the Northeast. Since then, his songs of yearning have become more experimental and opaque, taking tangents through misty synth-pop (2016’s Pool), dreamy dance music (2018’s The House), and blunted ballads that recall Arthur Russell’s lonesome home recordings (2020’s Ricky Music). But recently, he’s been thinking about getting loud again.
On tour in support of the exuberant pop songs from 2021’s All Day Gentle Hold !, Maine got a chance to indulge that urge. He turned up the distortion on his guitar, thrashed around the stage, and screamed—a way of exorcizing the anxiety and unhinged energy that lurks beneath his music, even at its softest. These shows provided the immediate spark for Shirt, Maine’s sixth studio album as Porches, a collection of the most crushing songs he’s recorded to date.
The record’s heaviest moments document what he’s called the “precarious emotional state” that he put himself in while making the record. Working in a windowless basement rehearsal space and smoking “a lot of weed” for the first time in his life, he allowed himself to explore an emotional terrain he doesn’t often access. He wrote songs about existential anxiety and day-to-day distress, accompanying the abstract yet upsetting imagery of his lyrics with shredded production and raw arrangements.
Single “Rag” is perhaps most indicative of the intensity that Maine reaches toward throughout Shirt. Wounded and paranoid, he braids together lyrics about libidinous desire and flickering violence over a blown-out instrumental that evokes Deerhunter’s in-the-red adventures on Monomania. The coiled intensity of “Sally” recalls the gnarled miniatures that Maine’s former tourmate Alex G nestled between love songs on his own early records. On “Itch,” Maine further explores this distorted desperation, offering words of piety and pain while slamming away on menacing guitar chords that clang and clatter like an oil drum striking concrete.
Shirt’s most striking moments twist these familiar rock tropes into something more uncanny. Auto-Tune, an occasional fixation of Maine’s, renders his voice gooey and gross, smearing it across the tracks like a bug caught under a windshield wiper. Even as guitars loom in the foreground, there are also moments like the narcotic ballad “Precious,” where every layer sounds unsteady and tense, as if a sinkhole might open up and swallow it.
