Minneapolis indie-rock band Porch Light were simply enjoying making music together, performing covers in a basement, when guitarist Kyle Siemon thought it might be fun to post a few videos on TikTok for the simple reason, “Everyone else is doing it.” The members of Porch Light thought it might be fun to see what might happen.

That was about two years ago. Fast-forward to now, and Porch Light have more than half-a-million followers across social platforms, more than 25 million streams, and have sold out headlining shows in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Now signed to the label Mom+Pop Music, Porch Light released their debut album, Hush, on September 18, 2026.

Named The Local Show’s artist of the month for October, Porch Light visited The Current studio to play four songs: their 2025 single, “Oxygen,” plus three songs from Hush. Watch and listen to the session in the player above, and below, find a transcription of The Local Show host Diane’s interview with Porch Light vocalist Jackie Uhas.

Interview Transcript

This is Diane, host of The Local Show on The Current, sitting across from the lead singer of our Artist of the Month, Porch Light – Jackie Uhas. Good to have you in the studio. That was an incredible performance today. How did that feel?

It felt great. Thank you so much for having us. Yes, this is the coolest place ever, and you guys are the coolest people ever.

You all had an incredibly exciting last year or so, on the fast track to stardom: touring all over North America, millions of streams, festival slots, Lollapalooza, Hinterland, and upcoming shows at the Troubadour and Bowery Ballroom. You all basically just started, and now your first record, Hush, out now. First of all, congratulations on all your hard work. How are you feeling, taking all of this in as you are amid really living the dream.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a lot of work, and it's nonstop, even though it's the greatest blessing in the world. And I think that what makes it so much easier to navigate, and to get to the position that we are in so quickly, is the fact that we're a band. It's all five of us in this together, so we keep each other really grounded. We're really ambitious, and we're really excited. I don't know; we just go with the flow and hope that everything turns out the way we want it to. It's just been a really, really natural journey for us.

Yeah, I've got to imagine that teamwork element is so important. You definitely have that chemistry onstage and, as I am seeing, offstage. Bring me a little bit into your circle of working with this really talented team.

I got really lucky. The guys that I'm in this band with are incredible people – not only musicians, but just humans. And we have a really strong form of communication with each other. I think that is what makes it so much better for us as a collective and a group, especially when it comes to writing, decision-making and all that jazz. But it's been wonderful. We keep each other so grounded. I can't imagine doing this alone, especially after how quickly everything has turned over. Not having them around and going through it together would be really scary. But they're the best. I feel so blessed that I get to have them in the band.

As this is all happening, have there been any experiences that have felt unexpected or unique, as you're going so fast from 2024, when you just started this band, to now, in 2026?

I think everything, honestly. Everything. I think the festivals this summer were really surreal. I had never really attended very many festivals. I could never really afford to do it. They're so expensive. They're worth it, but they're very expensive. And so, being able to enjoy these festivals for the first time – and I happen to be playing them – has been a really surreal and incredible experience. It's really, really cool. Also, just the record: the fact that, two years in, we get to put out an album. It's really cool.

Let's talk about that new album. It's called Hush. It's your first LP. You worked with Caleb Wright for the third time, but now at Pachyderm Studios. Talk to us about this new record.

Well, my favorite part about it is probably that it dips its toes into a bunch of different realms of music, with "Under" being at one end of the spectrum and "James" being at the other end. And everything fitting in the middle. We are two years in, and it is our third project, but I think we're still learning and navigating the type of music we want to make. Things happen very organically with us, like I've said before. So, the songs tend to fall into place and write themselves. It was a really cool experience to be able to build these out and make a cohesive project with songs that go across this whole spectrum, but then fit into this one record.

And Caleb is incredible. I have nothing but amazing things to say about that man. We love him so much. He keeps us so grounded and maintains this wonderful energy in the studio that leaves us wanting to go back the second we leave.

You mentioned the song "Under," and you mentioned the song "James." You didn't perform "Under" today, but it's the very mosh-pit-y, scream-at-you song. That's the most aggro I've heard you sing, and you nail it. And then "James" is very delicate. I think Stereogum put it really nicely. They said something about how you're able to balance the delicate with heavy aggressiveness. Talk to me a little bit more about that.

I mean, I'm just, like, very loud. I can be very verbally aggressive. I don't think people really know that, especially based on interviews, because I talk like this. But I'm a very loud, outward person. I think I said that the last time – that I'm very outward. And so, "Under" was just kind of this side of me. I think another way to define this spectrum is, like, two different sides of me: the softer side that I feel like not a lot of people get to really see – it's kind of something that's more sacred to me; it doesn't come as naturally – versus a little bit more abrasive and raunchy, where "Under" kind of falls. And I feel like that is honestly probably the most natural way that I exist in the world: very just in your face, a little bit.

We didn't even know what to do with that song at first because the guys had written it, and I wrote a verse and not really a chorus. I was trying to figure out what to do with that space there. And right before we went to the studio, I was like, "What if I did this?" I just started yelling, and they were like, "Yeah, cool." I was like, "All right."

It was the last song to record, and I got a little drunk, and I just went in there. We were like, "Two takes. We'll do it. Here we go."

Whatever you drank gave you a little bit of courage.

Jameson. I don't usually drink a lot, but they had me drinking Jameson.

That'll grow some hair on your chest. And you spent time at a cabin in the woods, in the dead of winter, to write this album with the entire group.

Yeah. So, Henry's family has this amazing property up on Lake Vermilion. It's been in his family for many years, and you have to get to it by boat ... there are just no roads to it. It's backed up to the forest, and we drove out there on the ice. We weren't even sure if the ice was thick enough. We had no clue if it was plowed or what. We just went up there and hoped for the best. And, I mean, you would get there and have to turn the heat on, so it was freezing. The floorboards were freezing. Yeah, I was sitting on the ground with my heating pad and six pairs of socks on, trying to get a fire lit in there. And, yeah, we just hunkered down and spent, I want to say, about a week. I cooked meals for them every night.

Oh, you're a cook.

Yes, I love cooking.

What do you love cooking?

I like cooking a lot of chicken, for some reason. I feel like it kind of gets me a little skeeved out. Sometimes it makes me nervous, but that's my go-to. I like to cook a lot of chicken.

And one thing that also came up before the cameras were rolling was that you were born in Singapore, which is apparently a story that all the people who grew up with you know, but I don't know that anyone else in the world knows about. Give us a little bit of a rundown on you being born in Singapore.

My parents were really young when they started having kids, and they were big risk-takers. My dad had an engineering degree, and he had just gotten out of the Navy after six years, with two kids and me on the way. They decided to take this opportunity at a computer hard-drive company and move to Singapore with two kids and, again, me on the way. Then I lived there for the first two or three years of my life, and then we came back. My birth certificate is from there, so I have to use a certificate of birth abroad, which I think is really funny because it's just so random. Singapore is such a random place, too.

It is, but it seems so advanced.

It is! They're strict.

But also, the technology ...

It’s kind of like a space city. Kyle was just there with his girlfriend recently.

You're very much an amazing singer, and a focal point of Porch Light is your singing voice. And I love this story – that they discovered you singing karaoke, because I grew up singing karaoke. I'm Filipino, so –

Tony's Filipino, too.

Go, Filipinos!

We love Filipinos.

So, it's just very much a part of my upbringing. And the fact that they saw you singing Hayley Williams, who is very much reflected in a lot of your voice –

Yeah, she's a big inspiration.

Yeah, and she's incredibly difficult to sing.

Yeah, especially her earlier stuff, because her range at that point – I mean, she was still pretty young, too, and I feel like it does change as you get older. You can do as much as you can to maintain it, but some of her early stuff is – I can't. I can't even. I don't even try. I'm serious. I don't even dabble. It just keeps me humble, you know.

Tell me how you started developing your singing voice. There's a control that you have with your voice – being able to sing so delicately and then also belt.

There's not a certain point in time that I can pinpoint, because I've been doing it forever. My dad is a musician, and he sings. So I think I was pretty influenced by him, or I got it from him. My mom's tone-deaf, so, love you, Mom, but you can't sing at all. And all she listens to is '80s music. No hate to '80s music. But I grew up listening to Boston and Rush with my dad and screaming in the car. So, I'm singing Rush — crazy vocal range there.

And my first time singing in front of people was kindergarten. I sang "Bleeding Love," front to back, a cappella, in front of my class, and that's the earliest memory I have of singing. And I was a really fearless child, so I would just go up and do it. I didn't really care if I sounded good or bad. I just had this innate belief in myself that was very, very strong. I have my parents to thank a lot for that. But I've just been singing since then.

I cannot remember a time when I wasn't, and I never expected it to become my career. I didn't want to depend on it because I didn't want to ruin it for myself, you know what I mean? So, I never really gave it a huge shot. And then, when I became an adult, I stopped playing guitar and singing as much because I was trying to be a little bit more of a realist and less of a dreamer — even though I think I'll always be a little bit of a dreamer.

Yeah, I stopped doing it for a while, and then went through some stuff and moved to the city, and discovered how incredible the scene is here. It's just unlike anywhere. After traveling, too, Minneapolis is such a beautiful, wonderful place for musicians, for creatives, for artists. It's just wonderful. And I just wanted to sing, so I sang karaoke at Como Tap every Wednesday and hoped for the best. And then I met the guys. Fate, weirdly, I feel like, had a role to play in that, but I believe in that stuff.

So, were they regulars there, or did they just happen to come through?

Yeah, all the musicians used to hang out there a few years ago, and then, like things do, it just shifted. I think the crowd shifted a little bit, so I know people don't really go there as much. But I lived in Como for three years, so I used to go and play pool all the time. That's where I met Henry and asked him to join the band, because he was playing pool there with my friends.

And I love how natural it was that, even before you released music, you had already gained this big following. Then there was a buildup and expectation of "All right, now give us your original music," and then you all came through. Your music is so well received by your fans.

It is so weird.

Your fans are hardcore.

It happened very quickly – the turnover. Porch Light really became a band that August. Then we were posting covers. We just started doing it. Kyle was like, "Let's just post. Everyone else is doing it. I'm just going to take videos." We didn't think anything of it, right? We wanted to play house shows. We wanted to just be in a band. We didn't really have expectations for it. And I think we got really lucky that we hit the algorithm at a really good time for bands. Kyle really pushed us to take advantage of that time, honestly, even just for fun – just for the sake of seeing what could happen. And then it took off. We posted "Fallback." It was not a very good video, and that just caught. We wrote it probably two weeks before that – and that was maybe two or three months after we first started posting on TikTok. It was very, very quick, and then we just had to adjust. I dropped out of school to go record the first EP. I had four months left of cosmetology school, and I'd been in it for two years because I kept not going.

And were you writing songs before that, or —

My songwriting — I'm not much of a songwriter. I am now, but I wasn't, and it's probably the most insecure point of my career, where I'm still learning and developing it. And the guys help me so much because they're very gifted and natural at their instruments. But I didn't write music growing up.

And then I went through a really bad breakup a few years before I met the guys – two years before I met the guys — and there are just some things in life that force you into things that eventually make sense later on. You don't understand what's happening as it's happening, but now I look back and I'm like, I was so devastated over this experience that I had with this person. But if it didn't happen, I would have never started writing music. And that's why I'm such an everything-happens-for-a-reason type of person. I have every possible reason to feel that way.

But, yeah, I just started writing music, and then I started posting it on Instagram. Kyle had hit me up about being in a band, and then he heard that I was writing original music, and he was like, "Oh, yeah. Let's do something with this." The first songs were not very good.

Naturally.

I still feel like you can see the trend of me getting more comfortable, and us getting more comfortable with writing. But I'm definitely a singer. I love performing. Songwriting, I'm still working out the kinks, and I kind of just let it happen naturally. I try not to overthink it because I feel like that's where I get into a not-great spot.

Well, it seems to be working well. I think the new record is fantastic. "Oxygen" is one of the songs you performed that was just quite outstanding. I love the composition of it.

Thank you. I actually wrote that one acoustically in my basement before the guys touched it. I mean, they made it what it is, but that was one — that was me on guitar, the whole thing, before they made it what it is.

Yeah, I think you know what you're doing.

I think I'd say I'm pretty good. I just try to speak my truth.

I'm looking ahead at your schedule, and I'm like, wow, you are all going across North America. What does tour prep look like for you? And even on the road, how do you take that on?

Getting ready for tour is mostly just keeping your health up. My manager — his name's Lou — is the greatest person in the whole entire world. I love him so much. He actually caught us, funny story, before we blew up. We had 200 followers, and we had just started as a band. He saw one video, and he just knew. He's incredible.

He always says that if you're not 100 percent when you go on tour, you're never going to hit 100 percent again, because it's a lot. It doesn't seem like a lot because you're spending most of it in a van, driving. But we're doing a lot of shows back-to-back, which we are very new to. I mean, everything we do these days is a new experience, which is really cool. But it's daunting, making sure that you're prepared for the unexpected. So, mostly just stocking up on everything I need. I've found that I need a humidifier for our hotel rooms because air conditioners really screw me over. I get really sick on the road every time ... I'm screaming every night.

I just recently had my first two vocal coaching lessons, and I've been breathing wrong and singing wrong for my whole life. So, it's been helping a lot with stamina. And now I go to the gym so I can run around and sing, because I have really bad asthma. I have a handheld nebulizer and all that stuff.

But, yeah, prepping for tour is just, like – I love fashion and I love clothes, but when we're performing, I don't want to think about what I'm wearing. Truthfully, it's kind of weird. I thought I would always really care about that, but I kind of just like being in a T-shirt and jeans and not focusing on what I'm wearing, but thinking about what I'm singing. I'm trying to lean more into what I like to wear when I go out with my friends. So, kind of planning outfits and planning how many bags I'm bringing. A bunch of bags this time, because we're getting a trailer, and they don't have any say on that because I'm a girl, and I can bring an extra suitcase if I want to ... They have all their instruments, and I get to bring all my shoes. Yes. So, yeah, it's stocking up on lozenges and all sorts of stuff, and packing, for the most part. Tour prep - running the set, things like that. Planning out a set is really interesting.

Well, this is the most awesome part: you're going to have performed all these shows, and then you're going to come back, and you're going to have November 21 on the books to headline your first show at First Avenue. You've played there for Best New Bands, but now you get to headline it in front of all your fans. And did I see that it's low tickets already?

Yeah.

Wow. Tell me how that feels.

It feels like I'm honestly at a loss for words because it's, um — it's First Avenue. It's everyone's dream. Every musician's dream in Minneapolis is to play First Avenue, and we've just been so blessed. It's incredible. It's really, really incredible. And we are - I mean, obviously, that's the show we're most excited for, and so we're ready to just kind of leave our hearts out on that stage. Truthfully, I think that it will be something that we will remember for the rest of our lives, and that's such an incredible thing to get to say that you did. And, yeah, the people at First Avenue are amazing.

Video Segments

00:00:00 Oxygen
00:03:41 Paranoia
00:07:46 Porch Light’s Jacqueline Uhas interview Diane, part 1
00:10:26 Crossfire
00:14:11 Porch Light’s Jacqueline Uhas interview with Diane, part 2
00:17:09 James

Song 1 is Porch Light’s 2025 single; all others from the band’s 2026 album, Hush, available on Mom+Pop Music.

Musicians

Jackie Uhas – singer
Zac Fogarty – guitar
Henry Hughes – bass
Kyle Siemon – guitar
Tony O'Keefe – drums

Credits

Guests – Porch Light
Host/Producer – Diane
Video – Josh Sauvageau
Audio – Cameron Wiley
Camera Operators – Evan Clark, Josh Sauvageau
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producers – John Kueppers, Luke Taylor

External Link

Porch Light – official site