Porches Announces MASK: A Ragged Four-Track Mixtape and New Single "Habit"

Porches will release a new mixtape called MASK on May 14, Aaron Maine announced this week, and he’s arriving with a bruised, unvarnished single called “Habit” and a video directed by Rebekah Campbell.

The timing of the release highlights the split creative currents Maine has been navigating: earlier this week he was credited as a co-writer and co-producer on Kim Petras’ single “Jeep,” a sleek pop moment, while MASK embraces the opposite impulse — lo-fi immediacy and deliberate imperfection.

“Habit” sounds intentionally ragged: big drum stomps, rambling guitar, a hungover rock feeling that foregrounds texture over finish. The recordings are literal in their roughness; Maine says he tracked the mixtape on a four-track and mixed straight off the tape machine, a method that resists post-session trimming and fixes.

“I recorded MASK on my four-track last spring (2025) in the basement on Wooster Street in New York City. I mixed it straight off the tape machine. I was inspired by how impossible it is to really edit anything on the four-track, and I feel like a special spirit was captured in these recordings by embracing their imperfections. I wanted to share them in their rawest form to keep that energy I felt intact.”

That philosophy frames the project as a deliberate counterpoint to more produced work, an exercise in preserving moment and mood rather than chasing polish. The visual for “Habit” arrives with the single and the tape-saturation approach bleeds into the presentation: Ryan McGinley provides the mixtapes cover art, and the single’s video is credited to Rebekah Campbell, tying the lo-fi recording choices to a specific aesthetic lineage in contemporary indie photography and film.