Porter Robinson broke through as a teenager with a sound he more or less invented himself — complextro, a glitchy, chiptune-inflected strain of EDM that produced 2012's “Language,” a UK Top 10 hit that made him a headliner before he could legally drink in the US. Worlds, his 2014 debut album, pushed further from that template, and the trance-leaning Virtual Self alias that followed earned him a Grammy nomination for “Ghost Voices.”
Nurture, the 2021 album that came after years of writer's block and depression following Worlds, is a different record almost on purpose — more acoustic, more nakedly personal, still recognizably electronic underneath — and it hit No. 1 on Billboard's dance albums chart. He'd already started Second Sky by then, a festival he curates entirely around music he actually wants to hear rather than what's commercially expected of an EDM bill, and when the pandemic made that impossible in person, he built an online version, Secret Sky, instead.