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The Sounding Board

Consider leaving Porch Light on

by Ben Hohenstatt on September 22, 2026

A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.

Hush

Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely underheard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.

In my teenage years, terrestrial radio was extremely important to me, and since I resided within the sprawling reach of Chicagoland, I had an embarrassment of riches to sort through.1

As the first decade of the new millennium stretched into its second half, I definitely owned an mp3 player, maybe even an honest-to-goodness iPod procured through careful saving and skillful navigation of Best Buy’s return policy.2 However, mobile storage was a premium commodity, a combination of file-sharing sites and my local library didn’t meet all of my needs, and I was years away from a debit card of my own to spend on iTunes. So, I spent a lot of time bouncing between stations, separating wheat from chaff and developing both a personal taste and a precocious fondness for talk radio.3

Multiple pop stations spun heavily censored versions of the day’s ringtone rap and pop hits to keep me up to speed for school dances. Classic rock radio stations north and south of the Wisconsin border offered two-for-Tuesdays and chances to get the Led out.4 Oldies stations provided glimpses even further back into pop music’s annals, sometimes sating my curiosity  about how the stuff I learned about in music class became the tapes my parents played, but more often raising questions, like “What is Lou Christie doing with his voice?” In the early morning and late evening, shock jocks and “Loveline” were a crucial source of vocabulary-expanding inane chatter. Even the then-novel adult hits format added some value in a world in which Jack FM took up only one spot on the dial and there weren’t a half-dozen places to stream decades-old one-hit wonders. 

However, alternative rock radio was the default in my bedroom and first car. Q101 (101.1 on the dial) was my preferred station, to the point I had the call-in number saved in my first cellphone, but I would venture toward the short-lived the Zone (94.7),  the Chicago stalwart XRT (93.1), or low-powered Round Lake Beach-based weirdness (98.3) during commercial breaks or Plain White T’s songs. Outside those dire straits, I mostly listened to what the DJ’s played and hoped the next song — or on rare occasion, full album — was good.5

That meant a lot of time spent hearing the likes of “Becoming the Bull” by Atreyu, “Miss Murder” by AFI, “I’m So Sick” by Flyleaf, and a bunch of less memorable post-grunge dreck.6 Despite the familiarity, I mostly didn’t grow to love that music.7 Still, I did find elements of songs to like and admire, and nowadays there’s something about a polished, kind of heavy, fairly angsty song that fills me with warm nostalgia. 

Porch Light’s new album, Hush, hits the dead center of that radio-induced soft spot.8 The debut long-player from the young Minneapolis five-piece is emotive, melodic, makes effective use of a two-guitar attack and is fairly polished to boot. It’s a first album that marks Porch Light as a band to keep a tab on as well as one worth spending some time with in the present day. 

Hush’s best moments come on its hardest rocking songs. Tracks like the late-album highlight “Under” simply bring out the best in every member of the band. Guitarists Zac Fogarty and Kyle Siemon get to swap licks and cover themselves in feedback-tinged glory and the uptick in intensity pushes vocalist Jackie Uhas into full-on rock’n’roll front person mode. Uhas, who acquits herself well throughout the album, does a thoroughly convincing job whether reducing her voice to a whisper or boiling over to a manic roar. Tony O’Keefe’s drums have a solid, thudding immediacy that seems lost on some quieter tracks. It gets tough to keep track of what bass player Henry Hughes is up to on “Under,” but his nimble rumble is a big part of why the thoroughly enjoyable album-opener “Arctic” pops. 

Ratcheting up the intensity has the added benefit of allowing Porch Light to move away from formulaic song structures that shape the album’s mid-tempo songs. Going from quiet to loud with a guitar solo about two-thirds of the way in between is reliable and reasonably appealing, but it feels like an arbitrary separation between Porch Light’s members and the emotionally charged head-banging music they enjoy making. It also feels rote. Aside from a couple rockers, and a roughly minute-long acoustic interlude, there isn’t a ton of songwriting variety within Hush’s lean 11 songs, and some light fatigue creeps in by the album’s end.

It will be interesting to see what Porch Light does next. The young band has the talent and personnel to pursue a few different equally interesting paths. Porch Light could stay the course, tighten things up on the margin and maybe try one or two big-swing songs. It could embrace a melodic hard-rock sound and make a blistering emo album. On the other end of the spectrum, the band could lean into the theatricality that touches the Hush‘s ballads and make pristine hair metal-tinged power pop LP. Maybe just give one of their guitarists a lap steel and try to make some money. While some choices would be more interesting than others, none of them — even going country — feel like an onjectively wrong move for the bad.

And there is still plenty to like about their existant body of work. If any of Hush‘s songs were carried over the airwaves 20ish years ago, I wouldn’t have touched the dial. 

  1. Nowadays, I’m a WFMU app fan. ↩︎
  2. Back then, a Best Buy warranty gave you a calendar year to return or exchange a malfunctioning or broken device. When you brought the device back, you actually got store credit to use, and you could put it toward an equivalent product and pay the difference between the devices. Since I was a teenage boy buying whatever electronics I could afford, they didn’t last long, and I could usually get a slightly nicer device each time. Coupled with rapid improvements in portable music tech at the time, I eventually wound up with a 160-gigabyte iPod that I still own today. It works, but its headphone jack is iffy. ↩︎
  3. Trash Talkin’ Tuesdays on Fox Sports Radio remain an unfortunate fascination. ↩︎
  4. Rocktober comes after Zeptember. ↩︎
  5. There was a whole dust-up when the station played Icky Thump by the White Stripes in its entirety a couple of weeks before the album was released. Jack White, surprisingly, was unamused. I also remember a less-dramatic playthrough of Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails after that album was released. It’s a little bloated, but that album mostly rules, and its songs sparkle in Nine Inch Noize format. Ditto most of that for Icky Thump. ↩︎
  6. Breaking Benjamin, Papa Roach, Blue October, Finger 11, etc. ↩︎
  7. “Mostly” because I remember really liking that AFI song, even if AFI doesn’t like that AFI song. ↩︎
  8. Released Sept. 18, via Mom + Pop, a label that somehow has eluded past mention in this column, but maintains a pretty awesome roster of artists. ↩︎

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