Porridge Radio are sharpening their craft, but they’re not pretending anything’s any easier, and that’s what makes them such a uniquely compelling band.

There a few more moments of decisiveness like that on Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky. Margolin described Porridge Radio’s last album as “an unfinished sentence,” and there are plenty of open-ends on their follow-up, but there’s also a larger sense of purpose. The band sound like they’re ready to push past and move on from the elliptical, unceasing nature of their thoughts. “No, I don’t want the end/ But I don’t want the beginning,” Margolin sings on the album’s closing track. There has to be some comfortable middle ground between empty nothingness and a fiery conclusion, and Porridge Radio are determined to find it.

A band who have been on the rise for a while, the new album Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky hears Porridge Radio really come into their own with a more developed sound.