Big fish

“Constant Noise” follows the band’s debut album ‘NAILS’ which earned widespread press and radio support and appeared in album of the year lists inc. Louder Than War (#1), BBC 6Music, NME, The Quietus, The Line Of Best Fit and more. After a succession of different line-ups, Benefits have now settled as a two-piece made up of Hall and electronic virtuoso Robbie Major. “We’re still angry” says Hall, “just angry in a different way to before. If the previous record was black and white, we wanted this to be technicolour.” The first taste of this new musical direction came in the form of “Land Of The Tyrants”, which saw the band delving into bass-heavy, dance inflected rhythms and subtle industrial undercurrents. Follow-up single ‘Relentless’ featured The Libertines’ Peter Doherty and saw the band move further into ambient electronic atmospherics. Doherty is just one of the collaborators on the new record, Zera Tønin, the singer of queer pop-electro duo Arch Femmesis, Neil Cooper of Therapy?, and Middlesborough rapper Shakkall make cameos. In addition to the guest musicians, the album also features production from James Welsh (Phantasy Sound), and James Adrian Brown (ex-Pulled Apart By Horses) who helped to guide the new direction. The result is an album that gleans as much from the likes of Underworld and Leftfield as it does the likes of The Streets or Beastie Boys in their pomp, or even the 90s /early 00s Indie Sleaze-era. 

BUY Benefits - Constant Noise on coloured vinyl

Japanese Breakfast’s For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) is a shimmering yet deeply intimate work, threading wistful melodies through grand, cinematic arrangements, which we have with a very limited PVC outer sleeve, and poster for inital orders. Jeffrey Lewis keeps his scrappy, lo-fi folk-punk spirit alive with The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis, a smart, self-deprecating ramble through life’s absurdities. My Morning Jacket’s is stretches their cosmic Americana to its limits, full of warm, reverb-drenched meditations. The Horrors shift gears again with Night Life, a dark, synth-heavy pulse of post-industrial paranoia and neon-lit melancholy. Shelagh McDonald’s Stargazer is an eerie relic of early ’70s folk-rock, her voice hovering like a ghost over lush, pastoral arrangements (and featuring a whos-who of 70s folk-rock royalty with members of Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Matthews Southern Comfort, and Fotheringay backing her). Krautrock Eruption is an unfiltered dive into the genre’s most mind-expanding moments (Conrad Schnitzler, Faust, Harald Grosskopf, Kluster, etc) capturing the sound of the future as imagined in the ’70s. The Lottery Winners’ KOKO is a euphoric indie-pop sugar rush, bursting with singalong hooks and unshakable charm. And Mercy, the final recording from Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, finds the dub icon in full psychedelic prophet mode, his voice echoing through a fog of spaced-out grooves and tripped-out textures.