Image by Tom White
Last month, Teesside’s Benefits returned with their new single “Land Of The Tyrants,” ahead of their tour, which brings them to Southampton’s Joiners on October 22nd. The track marks their first new material since 2023’s widely acclaimed debut album “NAILS”.
“NAILS” landed in April last year, raising a voice of disillusionment about divisive, xenophobic, and toxic rhetoric. Prior to release, the band had generated a word of mouth following and after catching the ear of Invada Records co-founder Geoff Barrow, the band released an album which delivered on all that early promise. “NAILS” not only earned widespread plaudits and radio playlist spots, but it also appeared in album of the year lists from the likes of Louder Than War (#1), BBC Radio 6 Music, NME, The Quietus, The Line Of Best Fit, Loud & Quiet, Far Out, God Is In The TV, and more.
After such an incendiary year, which has also seen the band make their Glastonbury Festival debut and tour across the EU and UK, the question facing both Benefits and their fans was “what’s next?”.
“Maybe it’s better to just give up” muses frontman Kingsley Hall. “A year of endlessly stopping and starting, building up, getting knocked down, transforming, imploding. I’m sure we split up at one point, but it just slipped our minds, so we carried on. Audiences came intrigued by what they’d heard about us in the music press, some stayed, some fled to the nearest exit their hands cupped tight round their ears. We supported Warmduscher and a guy in the front row recommended I get therapy. We got album of the year accolades for something we recorded in our bedrooms. It was a strange old time.”
Rather than split up, what the band did instead was re-calibrate. After going through a succession of drummers, Benefits have now settled as a two-piece made up of Hall and electronic virtuoso Robbie Major. Set on continuing their abstract process of composing music spontaneously, sending each other lyrics, beats, and notes inspired by whatever feeling or experience they might’ve had in that moment, the duo’s new work marks a shift in their style but not in their ethos. Whilst it may have been obvious to follow up “NAILS” with more aggressive, angry, noisy, and abrasive material, “Land Of The Tyrants” finds the band exploring new musical territory.
“Our songs are still angry, WE are still angry” says Hall, “but we are approaching it all in a different way. This is a punk move from us, this IS punk, but not as you might know it.”
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