Teesside noisemakers Benefits are back with new single Land Of The Tyrants – their first new material since their acclaimed debut album NAILS.
The long-player landed in April last year as a carpet bomb of anger and disillusionment about divisive, xenophobic, and toxic rhetoric, told through the filter of brutal, eviscerating music.
Evene before its release, Benefits had generated a word-of-mouth following most artists can only dream of, and after catching the ear of Invada Records co-founder Geoff Barrow, released an album which delivered on that early promise.
NAILS not only earned widespread plaudits and radio playlist spots, but it also appeared in many album of the year lists.
After such an incendiary year, which also saw the band make their Glastonbury Festival debut and tour across the EU and UK, the question facing 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, 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.”
Built from a short piece Major wrote in his attic, Land Of The Tyrants sees Hall deliver his stream-of-consciousness style scattering on the frustrations of modern life and the manipulation of identity, over bass-heavy, ’90s dance-inflected rhythms and industrial undercurrents nodding to the likes of Underworld or Leftfield.
Zera Tønin, the singer of queerpop-electro duo Arch Femmesis, provides guest vocals on the track after they supported Benefits in Nottingham and captivated the band.
The single’s accompanying video, directed by Teesside filmmaker John Kirkbride, is inspired by 1980 film The Long Good Friday, combining the song’s night-time drive feel with subtle ’70s and ’80s imagery. It was filmed from inside the car, replicating the heightened intensity of the films closing scene.
This autumn Benefits will give fans a first live taste of this new material as they prepare to head out on a new UK and EU tour. The dates will follow an Arab Strap support date at Glasgow’s Barrowlands Ballroom later this week and come ahead of festival appearances at Left Of The Dial, Iceland Airwaves, and Transmusical.
