You never know what’s gonna resonate with an audience. In the case of Porch Light, it was a dingy old Minneapolis basement.
The basement belonged to guitarist Zac Fogarty, and as guitarist Kyle Siemon explains, it wasn’t chosen for either its photogenic or sound-enhancing qualities, though it turned out to have both.
“That was the only place we had to play,” Siemon says, speaking to me, along with the rest of the band, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the latest spot on Porch Light’s East Coast tour. “We’d been out on the porch before that, but once it got cold we went downstairs.”
Still, it was a distinctive spot. “It looks like just this crazy dungeon space,” says singer Jackie Uhas.
It was Siemon’s idea to start documenting the band’s practice sessions. “When we would get together, whatever we were doing, playing covers or whatever, I would just set up a camera and record,” he says. “Whatever we got that day I’d throw it up on social media.”
But a funny thing happened as the band gained a social media following. “A lot of the comments were just about the basement we were playing in,” Uhas says.
Porch Light’s success has been a mix of happy accidents like that and mapped-out foresight. Every good band needs an origin story, and Porch Light has theirs down. Uhas sang karaoke at the Como Tap every Wednesday. One night, Siemon heard her and invited her to join the band.
Fogarty, Siemon, and drummer Isaiah Trimbo already played together in the Dalmatian Club. They added bassist Henry Hughes, and Porch Light was a band with a vision.
“The kind of music we wanted to make was one of the first things we talked about, and we all agreed, like, immediately,” says Uhas.
“We all grew up listening to classic rock and we’re super into the ’90s sound,” Siemon says, adding that they “wanted to get into something heavier” than the prevalent indie sound in town.
As Fogarty puts, “We saw there was kind of a space in the Minneapolis scene for something a little more alt-rock.”
Though they do rock, Porch Light isn’t exactly out to melt your face off. “Fall Back” chimes with chords that recall the Cranberries, “Recognize” rings out with echoes of the Sundays. And “Oxygen” has that soft verse/loud chorus shift in dynamics that marked so many alternative hits.
Holding these influences together is Uhas, who can get soft and pretty, as on “Honey,” but can also belt when it’s called for without sacrificing vocal clarity. Where some throwback bands recall a specific moment, Porch Light’s purview spans the length of the ’90s—they could have played both 90210’s Peach Pit After Dark and Buffy’s The Bronze.
Porch Light built up a local buzz so quickly that they played First Avenue’s Best New Bands night in January before they’d officially released any music. They entered 2025 ready to prove themselves.
“We had traction going in so it was like, ‘We’ve got to provide the product,’” says Uhas. When they went into Flowers Studio in Minneapolis with producer Caleb Wright, who has worked with Hippo Campus and Samia, they were champing at the bit.
“We were like, ‘We gotta get this done,’” Fogarty recalls. “And he’s like, ‘Let’s go out to eat, just hang out, get to know each other.’”
“He keeps us reined in, because it’s so easy to get ahead of yourself when you’re in the studio,” Uhas puts it.
It’s been a fruitful collaborative relationship. After finishing their self-titled EP, released in April, they recorded a second EP, Navy Blue, with Wright, this time out at Cannon Falls’ storied Pachyderm Studio.
But for all the local praise and online attention, it wasn’t till Porch Light hit the road that it all gelled for them. It was on tour they made the discovery that those social media likes and comments translated into actual humans.
As Fogarty says with amazement, “In Decatur, Georgia, people show up and sing the songs we wrote.”
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