Peter McPoland’s 'PIGGY' Finds Beauty in the Discomfort
“I like weird stuff that makes people think. It’s uneasy, but it’s cool.”
I cannot find the right words to describe Peter McPoland’s latest release, Piggy, and I think this is exactly what he intended with the project. Over the last few months, the 22-year-old artist has micro-dosed his matured sound throughout several single releases, including the political, angsty anthem “Digital Silence.” Piggy serves as McPoland’s true testament to becoming a fully-realized artist, producer, and human being. Peter McPoland 2.0 has arrived, and he is here to stay.
Piggy is a bag of contradictions—beautifully unsettling, disruptively calming, and ridden with anxiety... yet somehow completely present. It almost feels like clicking random buttons on the back of the TV, shuffling through the black and white fuzz, waiting for the pixels to return back to the way they were. It’s at times perplexing, at times transfixing but ultimately makes sense in the end.
From its first track, “Mold,” Piggy establishes itself as the antithesis to the typical bedroom-pop tunes one might have expected from McPoland in 2022. “Mold” trades acoustic pop production and folky songwriting for self-produced drums, gritty vocal chops, and distorted electric guitars, as the budding auteur sings about rotting away, like the mold in between the walls. Meanwhile, in “Blue,” he apologizes for his behavior, repeating, “What I said, I didn’t mean, don’t slow down for me,” moments before the track crescendos into a fret-burning guitar solo.
Lyrically, Piggy feels like a stream-of-consciousness diary spilled to the Notes app, figuring out how to deal with harrowing emotions and getting closer and closer to some semblance of an answer as the album progresses. In “Digital Silence,” a dissonant feedback loop and glitchy vocals accompany McPoland as he lights the world on fire through politically-charged storytelling. Meanwhile, “Ceiling Fan/Piggy” is an honest self-reflection from the perspective of hanging from a ceiling fan, spinning around and around and getting lost in the haze.
When asked about the project’s title, McPoland shares, “I have a group chat with a bunch of tight friends from high school called ‘Lord of the Flies.’ One character in the book is named Piggy. He gets his head crushed by a boulder. Between the divorce and the [writer’s] block, it was a shitty year, so I felt like Piggy.”
While Piggy is an album meant to be experienced in chronological order, standout track “Dog” features a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. McPoland sets the scene, singing, “Damn fucking dog, ears perk up when the hinges squeak,” as he continues to list off his frustrations with ‘the dog.’ In the track’s official music video, featuring McPoland himself as ‘the dog,’ we watch a destructive relationship between a dog and his owner unfold in the style of a mid-2000’s indie film.
Overall, Piggy is a thought-provoking project charged by the emotions of a true artist. McPoland puts it best when he says, “My whole purpose is to make art. I just try to be a vessel for it to come out past all of the overstimulation and noise on the internet.”
Listen to Piggy below:
