We are thrilled to announce details of the 2024 edition of our annual Abbey Road Amplify x Pitchfork London collaboration, in partnership with leading American tastemaker publication, Pitchfork.
This year's edition sees a brilliant new collaboration between American indie rock musician IAN SWEET and British, Mercury Prize nominees Porridge Radio. The new single Everyone’s A Superstar is out now via Polyvinyl.
Abbey Road Amplify x Pitchfork London sees artists playing the Pitchfork London festival come to Abbey Road to work with our engineers and write and record a new song.
As seen in the above video, the sessions are documented on film, with revealing interviews about the songwriting, recording and production process captured.
Speaking about the new single, IAN SWEET say:
‘We all went into this day with no expectations but also wide eyes and a lot of excitement!
To be at Abbey Road was a dream, and to be reunited with Porridge Radio was also a dream (IAN SWEET's first UK tour was supported by PR), so it was so fun to see our old friends again in a totally new context and to make something special together.
We all clicked in a really magical way right off the bat, everyone sort of took their places and fit in where they had to. We came out of it with something I feel so proud of. And something I never knew would exist.
Writing with Dana and seeing her process as a lyricist was really enlightening as well. It had been a long time since I’d written lyrics with someone else…I was excited to see where her mind went and how our two styles found one unique voice together.’
Porridge Radio add:
‘It was amazing to come into a room of 7 musicians with absolutely no idea what was going to happen and lock-in together to write and record a song that we actually all love in one day. Creatively it was so exciting and such a fun process and we’re so proud of what we made.’
Speaking about the 2024 edition of Abbey Road Amplify x Pitchfork London, our Head of Brand and Communications, Mark Robertson says:
‘Working with cutting edge talent is one of Abbey Road’s uppermost priorities and we’re thrilled to continue our ongoing collaboration with Pitchfork into 2024. IAN SWEET and Porridge Radio’s single is undeniable and further proof of the value of collaborations, and what can be achieved when artists come together in the studio’.
2023’s SUCKER, Jillian Medford's fourth album as IAN SWEET follows her 2021 breakthrough and Polyvinyl debut Show Me How You Disappear, which chronicled her time spent in an intensive outpatient program that included six hours of group therapy a day. "Show Me How You Disappear was written during a really difficult period of my life after reckoning with a mental health crisis,” she explains. “I survived that very moment in my life through writing that record, and the extreme urgency to heal is reflected in the songwriting. With SUCKER, I felt more capable to take my time and experiment without being totally afraid of the outcome. It wasn't life or death—it was just life, and I was lucky to be living it.”
Porridge Radio are one of the most vital new voices in alternative music, having gone from being darlings of the DIY underground to one of the UK’s most thrilling bands in the space of a few years. Their barbed wit, lacerating intensity and potent blend of art-rock, indie-pop and post-punk sounds like little else around, and led their 2020 album Every Bad making the nominees list for the coveted Mercury Music Prize. Their 2022 follow up, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, distilled the band’s myriad influences down like they’re flipping through their own singular dial: dreamy yet intense, gentle but razor-edged, widescreen and yet totally intimate.
