It’s 2005 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the local college basketball team has caught the eye of 13-year-old Porter Robinson at Chick-fil-A. He was a college basketball fanatic, and he had just spotted two players at a table near him. Paper and pen in his hand, Robinson approached them nervously.
“One of them immediately faked a phone call,” he cringes, “and the other signed everything for me. I never forgot that, and I was like: ‘I’m never, ever going to do that to somebody’.”
Robinson is 32 now, and he’s just released his third studio album ‘SMILE! :D’. For someone who started out their career as an EDM DJ in a “perpetual party”, Robinson has accrued a staggeringly loyal fanbase. It’s fame and fandom that consume this current record, as Robinson traces the contours of his career to feel for every impulse to be a good, conscientious public figure – and throws it out the window.
“When people tell me my music saved them, I always say I didn’t do it, you did”
“I hate being described as ‘wholesome’,” Robinson confesses. It’s an adjective his fans use a lot (along with “anime boy”), but “it really wigs me out because I know myself, and I know my flaws and where I come up short. I have so many ugly moments.”
It’s 2014 in Canada. By now, Robinson has become a successful EDM DJ, and he fucking hates it. He’s playing one of the first shows after his debut ‘Worlds’, his attempt to make an “emotionally grounded” record and “alienate every single person that had listened to my music” (a.k.a. EDM bros). He was miserable, so he did what any grumpy DJ would do: “berate” the crowd. Getting back on the bus after the show, Robinson remembers: “You could hear a pin drop.”
“My crew was like, ‘What is happening with Porter?’” he recalls. One lighting designer worked up the nerve to tell Robinson: “The crowd didn’t deserve that.” Robinson’s response is crystallised in ‘The Year Of The Cup’, one of the most poignant songs on ‘SMILE! :D’: “The crowd didn’t deserve to see me!”.
“I know,” he says ruefully. “I stormed off and got on my bunk and probably cried because I felt so rejected and unloved, and what I was doing was failing.” It was the VJ who saw through the bratty antics, and Robinson remembers him saying: “This seems like an insecure reaction to me.” It’s why, when Robinson sings, “Fuck you – you don’t deserve me!” the verse ends with: “‘Help me’ is what I meant to say”.
‘SMILE! :D’ – it’s an aggressive command, isn’t it? The all-caps, the exclamation mark and the hollow eyes of that emoticon appear less as a demand and more a desperate stake for reassurance when you take a closer look. It was written just after the release of Robinson’s critically acclaimed second album ‘Nurture’. It’s a yearning, sensitive exploration of depression, writer’s block, and the unshakeable urge to be creative. But that album was also nearly the end of Robinson’s career.
“In 2022, I was telling people that I was retired,” he says. “I was telling my friends, ‘I want to go do something else, I’m done’. Who I am started to matter a whole lot more – not just who I am creatively, but the way I am as a person. I didn’t want to play that game. It was killing me.”
It’s part and parcel of Robinson’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he was diagnosed with when he was a child. Along with a perfectionist streak, the condition causes him to “experience huge amounts of fear and anxiety around things that seem like they might go wrong”. Robinson’s catastrophising would flare up while writing ‘Nurture’, a record which functioned as “everything I wanted to hear when I was at the lowest point of my life”.
“I had been so careful about not getting into any kind of trouble that I felt like I was showing a very tiny sliver of myself,” he says. “And I just knew that facade would not last, so I tried to stop stopping myself. But I also think you can’t really escape who you are at the end of the day.”
‘SMILE! :D’ was written in one and a half years compared to ‘Nurture’s seven. Robinson calls it a “capsule” of every emotion he felt during that time period: “I wanted to tap into all the taboos that were present to me and every ugly, nasty feeling.”
On this album, he gave himself permission to say every stupid thought that entered his mind. You can hear it on songs like ‘Knock Yourself Out XD’, where he proclaims “Bitch, I’m Taylor Swift!” It’s how he got over his early retirement plans, by going into the studio and thinking: “If I wanted to release music that would be the last thing that I ever did, what would that sound like?”
Around the same time, Robinson started learning how to play the guitar, where he attempted to lean into the “rock star bravado” of the instrument. “I went into this album wanting to make a Killers record,” he says, “but I was forgetting the great amount of hypersensitive music that’s been made with the guitar.” It’s why introspective emo reigns supreme on ‘SMILE! :D’ – it’s Robinson stepping out of his comfort zone but never forgetting who he is.
“ I always try to give people as much of myself as I can when I meet them”
The move to write a bolder album, he adds, also sprung from an observation he made when interacting with his fans. “When I was in my bro era in 2010, people were dapping me up and slapping my ass, basically,” Robinson says. “Then I noticed that the people who seem to be the most influenced by my music had taken on this affect of meekness and fragility and deference.
“I was worried that what I was putting out into the world was this sense that people shouldn’t take up their fucking space, you know? So I wanted to be as big and bright and colourful as I thought I could possibly be.”
Where ‘Nurture’ was earnest to the point of “anti-irony”, Robinson’s embrace of irony on ‘SMILE! :D’ was another way to work around the pressure to play it safe. The cheekier lyrics on the record – like when an AI voice deadpans “Don’t kill yourself, idiot” – are, as Robinson has found, the moments fans have connected with the most.
“I really believe that saying something like that can be more helpful than trying to handle it with kid gloves,” he says. “You’re affording someone a bit of strength: like, ‘I know you can handle hearing this’. As somebody who’s gone through these things, it’s weird how that’s helped me cope better than somebody treating me like I’m going to implode if I hear the wrong thing.”
That’s not to say Robinson has completely done away with his sense of duty towards his fans, particularly those who connected with ‘Nurture’ and its heavier themes. Robinson writes about that “double-edged sword” on ‘SMILE! :D’: “Crying at the airport / I’m sorry, can I get a pic? / Telling me a sad story / Another reason not to quit.”
“That was happening,” Robinson admits. “It’s so weird: you’re in the airport and you’re stressed, and then you’re thinking, ‘Somebody might come up to me and need me right now’.
“When people come up to me and tell me they were going to kill themselves and my music saved them, I always tell people I didn’t do it, you did,” he adds. “That’s always important for people to hear. It’s stark, but it is true.”
It’s 2024 now. Robinson has just given away 100 pieces from his wardrobe worth $50,000 entirely for free. The catch? Fans had to come dressed to the nines; Robinson would have 60 seconds to assess their vibes and give them something from his collection in return. No words were to be spoken during the entire exchange. Many were designer clothes, but some got archival shirts from his old touring days that were, regrettably, on the tattier side.
“I would hear the muted celebrations of people as they were leaving with something that was not as valuable as the person before them,” he winces. “And people had waited for five hours. I was plugging my ears as they were leaving.”
Robinson knew the optics were questionable. “This is a bit showy,” he remembers his team telling him. “I was like, I know, but it still feels artistically right to me. I think there’s a real beauty in it, and I know it’ll create something memorable and good for people.”
The responsibility Robinson has felt towards his audience for over a decade won’t be going away anytime soon. It’s ingrained into the dynamic between fan and idol, as he notes in his teenage encounters with the basketballers.
“Maybe somebody in his family had cancer or something, and it was the worst day of his life,” Robinson reasons. “You don’t know. But that story can only be really interpreted in one way from a fan perspective. So I always, always try to give people as much of myself as I can when I meet them.”
As the conclusion of ‘SMILE! :D’ makes clear, there are consequences to this all-consuming relationship that “seems like it’s everything to me”. “When I first started this, I remember thinking to myself: I can outsmart fame,” Robinson recalls. “Like, these celebrities are fucking idiots. I’m never going to do drugs… I’m going to be so careful.
“But,” he says with the wisdom of someone over a decade deep into their career, “I don’t think you can outsmart something addictive.”
Porter Robinson’s ‘SMILE! :D’ is out now via Mom+Pop
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