Nurture — Porter Robinson

i’m not going to pretend to be objective about this one. Nurture is my most-played album of all time. I bought the CD at release and it has lived in the slot of my mom’s old grey 2011 nissan altima ever since. every time I drive, it goes on. i’m pretty sure my family is exhausted of “sooooo tellll meeeeee….”

released in april 2021, Nurture followed up his seminal 2014 debut Worlds. after years of personal and artistic struggles Robinson emerged with an album that feels deeply introspective, emotionally raw, and stylistically distinct from his earlier work.

Nurture isn’t really an album about mental illness or whatever you hear online, there’s definitely a bit of that. but the way i see it, It’s really an album about repairing an artist’s relationship with making things. every song asks the same question from a different angle, how do you keep creating when your own mind has become your harshest audience? It’s to learn to stop treating art as the cure in the first place.

and listening to it as someone who makes things is almost uncomfortable. Nurture is one of those albums you wish you’d made. i can’t imagine writing Get Your Wish, or Musician, or Dullscythe, i crave that, i really do. i catch myself imagining a version of me that already built the art I admire instead of just admiring it. the album captures the fantasy i think every artist quietly experience, whether they own it or not. it’s making something that feels unquestionably true. Porter spent seven years stuck, depression, creative stagnation, hundreds of scrapped songs, living inside the gap between his vision and his hands. and that cathartic release is nurture. every time I play it i’m hearing someone do the exact thing i’m afraid i can’t. it’s comforting and it’s a dare at the same time.

The album is obsessed with process and you can almost map it:

• “Musician” rejects productivity as self-worth.
• “Mirror” rejects perfectionism.
• “Get Your Wish” asks whether success even satisfies.
• “Trying to Feel Alive” ends by accepting that maybe satisfaction never arrives.

That last one is the key. The closing lyric:

“Maybe I don’t really need to feel satisfied”

Is almost an anti-climax, and that’s the point. Nurture doesn’t overcome it’s conflict, it sorta just accepts it (which is cool).

Two tracks deserve their own minute.

Dullscythe has always been one of the album’s most divisive tracks. Everyone is wrong and i’ll die on this hill. It’s a metaphor for his writer’s block, and it kinda sounds like it. it starts chaotic, disjointed, frustrated, like you’re literally hearing a song trying its best to become a song. then around the two-minute mark a tranquil melody breaks through. that’s the breakthrough. it’d be skipping the thesis.

Mirror is the keystone. it’s built around a sampled School of Life video, staged as a conversation between two versions of Porter, his vulnerable, authentic self and his critical inner voice. for years he pre-imagined the worst possible criticism to protect himself from getting hurt, and the song is about how that fear just holds you in place. 

“You’ve only said it to yourself / I know what you want from me.” 

the proverbial mirror is when you look at yourself and zoom straight in on the flaws, then project that disappointment outward.

Porter wanted his voice to sound slightly artificial rather than perfectly real, and by disguising his literal voice, he made the emotional content more honest. even the production participates in the thesis. Worlds tried to build another universe. Nurture records this one. birds, wind and field recordings. like as if reality became interesting again.

If you want a spiritual cousin, it’d probably be Bon Iver’s 22, A Million. Justin Vernon is an acknowledged influence, and both records use heavily processed voices to express vulnerability instead of hiding it. they both ask whether technology can make emotion feel more human, not less. and if you want the bigger frame: Nurture is to Worlds what Walden is to Romantic escapism. Worlds looked outward for a better place to be. Nurture is the opposite conclusion your perception, not the world, was the thing that needed changing. everything we need is already here and stuff, yo.

it’s not flawless. “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-da” is filler. it’s a fine song that interrupts an otherwise unbroken experience every time I sit with the album front-to-back. That’s the only real ding, and it’s a small one against a record this complete.

9/10. i can’t really review Nurture like a critic, because i don’t really listen to music like a critic. it’s just the album that’s been in my mom’s car for three years. Porter crossed the gap to who he is and who he’s trying to be. like a receipt, the album is proof of his growth.

ya i want that too.