Benefits: “‘Decency’ doesn’t make for a good headline – no one wants pop stars with principles”

Benefits have spoken to NME about the making of new album ‘Constant Noise’, the battle for principles in music, and making gigs more accessible and affordable.

With the Teesside noise-punks’ abrasive but acclaimed 2023 debut album ‘Nails’ hailed by NME for its “raw and primal urgency” – a record that “had to be made and heard now, like government-approved sewage being pumped into a river” – their new record sees the band take a left turn to better reflect the political climate.

“What we were doing on the first album was retaliating like-for-like with what I was seeing from more right-wing-centric personalities,” frontman Kingsley Hall told NME. “Their messaging seemed to be quite violent, confrontational and obvious. What I’ve always felt is that the opposite argument to that, by its nature, is never like that.

“You always tie yourself in knots by trying to argue with anything on the right wing, because to attempt to dismantle a basic argument with a complicated one makes everything unravel. ‘Nails’ was intentionally cartoonish and loud, although it wasn’t as simplistic as that. That was just the world we were living in around lockdown and Brexit – everything became so polarising.”

He added: “It still is now, but that was the first time we’d been so obviously pitted as one side against the other: you couldn’t have nuance, it had to be blatant.”

For their follow-up ‘Constant Noise’ – released today (Friday March 21) – the duo have retained their untethered rage and unrest at the powers that be, but carried with more subtlety and a sonic palette of much more colour to unravel the intricacies of the band’s message. With flashes of trance and ‘90s dance, the second effort from Hall and Robbie Major is a masterful and measured dose of reality against a void of humanity – and their best work to date.

“I spoke to you [NME] at Glastonbury and you asked, ‘What are you going to talk about now that Labour is in power?’ People presumed that was that and we didn’t need to exist anymore,” Hall added. “You’re bombarded with this bullshit constantly. This whole album hinges on that. ‘Oh, by the way I’ve just made trans people illegal,’ says Trump. He decides to get rid of DEI and every company decides to start knocking the shit out of people.

“Every morning my phone is full of horror. Stuff that I imagined in the past only happened once every few years is now every couple of hours.”

Check out our full interview below, where Benefits tell us about the enemy always being in their sights, the battle for the grassroots, and the freedom of never being “cool”.

NME: Hello Benefits. What can you tell us about your mission statement for ‘Constant Noise’? 

Kingsley Hall: “It’s easier to explain what we didn’t want to do with our second album than what we did. It was important not to fall into that second album trap of the self-indulgence of ‘Woe is me rockstar fatigue’. I’ve got no problem with bands that do that, it’s totally fine, but for me that was never an interesting route to go down.

“We’ve also never had the levels of success of the bands that do that! We don’t have to appease a huge fanbase with more of the same, so we have the luxury to try something different. We’ve also got the privilege of having a record company [Invada, founded by Geoff Barrow of Portishead and BEAK>] that are supportive in that.”

Robbie Major: “You quite often hear bands say, ‘We wrote this on the road in between gigs’. We wouldn’t be able to do that because we’re literally driving. It would have to be a whistling album, and we’ve heard enough of them.”

Hall: “Writing on the road is a nice idea, but we’re just not built for that. I’ve got to go back home and read bedtime stories and keep up to date with Bluey. I’ve been thinking a lot more about creating something that my daughter could one day be impressed with. With my dad dying a few years ago, you realise that you’re not infinite or invincible. Real-life things come at you, and when they do they fucking belt you. Since my little girl popped out, I see the passage of time in a different way.”

• READ MORE: Meet Benefits: an instant punk battlecry against flag-shaggers (and Chris Martin)

Is that a matter of mortality or just how fickle this industry is? 

Hall: “You don’t know when any of this might stop. After Glastonbury 2023, our phone just stopped ringing. We had critical success with the first album, but once Glastonbury was done we felt written off in a major way. There was a collective shrug from the industry. ‘Thank fuck that’s done, we can all move on now from this hangover from COVID’. Getting the opportunity to do it again is incredible really and totally unexpected.

“I’ve had this before. In my old band [The Chapman Family], we had that zip of fame. We never got to the level of a band like Boy Kill Boy, and Robbie and I both love that band, but we had NME Single Of The Week and were on the NME Radar Tour and got played on MTV. We had the flip of that in Benefits where we’d send emails and then nothing would happen.”

Who was ignoring you?

Hall: “This wasn’t on a media level, it was on every level. I’d go to a local festival here in my hometown and organisers who would have previously been encouraging or wanted us to play suddenly just turned their back on us. What the fuck have I done? Sorry we’re not cool anymore, but just be civil and decent.

“Having experienced all of that has made me really appreciative of whatever we get. I don’t care if we don’t get Glastonbury, any festivals or a sniff of a Mercury Music Prize – it doesn’t matter. Whatever we’ve achieved is way beyond what we both expected.”

Major: “We’re very grateful to still make music and go out on tour when a lot of other people would probably have given up and gone back to real life by now. It’s incredible. This band has taken us to places we never thought we’d go: Iceland and places in Italy you wouldn’t know existed.”

Hall: “We found an anti-Fascist group in the centre of Tuscany that really took to us. Those things are just unreal. We recognise that not every other band is given a chance. Everything for us was a stroke of luck: getting Sleaford Mods doing a tweet that Black Francis’ wife saw, so Black Francis saw and liked it so Elijah Wood saw it. These things just fall into place, but not everyone gets that luck and that chance.

“It feels like an industry that feeds on arrogance and bravado. I’m not sure where we fit. It’s difficult to see where we fit into that model.”

Do you remember our first interview?

Hall: “Oh yeah, the Coldplay thing! That was a bit different. Now ‘decency’ doesn’t make for a good headline. What we’re doing with reduced ticket prices and early curfews makes us sound like boring shits!”

It’s a double-edged sword. The music industry’s arrogance is baked in now for many ‘ready-made’ superstars, but a lot of them don’t say anything. Having any opinion can be confused with being ‘outspoken’. 

Major: “That’s it. The industry tends to push a lot of new and shiny artists they see as ‘the new thing’, but they don’t seem to make mistakes. That makes them seem boring. We constantly make a lot of mistakes. People liked our first album, so some may have advised us to make another that sounds identical. Maybe that’s how marketing works.

“This is a chance for us to do music that’s honest and that we believe in. We’re not really beholden to anyone. If we fail because we make a load of stupid decisions, then at least they’re our decisions and not through us trying to be something we’re not.”

Hall: “The inevitable ultimate failure will probably come through us trying to do the right thing. We have a tendency to stick to our own morals and principles. Oddly enough, that’s a great way to make enemies within the music industry. A trite example is us trying to get venues to let us stop our gig at 10pm instead of 11pm. We got quite a lot of pushback to that because it’s booze-selling time, but we just wanted to give people a decent chance of getting public transport home.

“Then there’s having a stance on genocide, warfare or right-wing populism. These things have an effect on your career, but no one really mentions that. It’s so fucking bizarre. We’ve been pretty consistent in our principles and politics. All of a sudden it seems to come as a big shock to people when you stick to it, instead of rolling over to play a certain gig. ‘No, we can’t do that because we’ve looked at the fucking sponsors, mate’. That makes you look problematic.”

Do you feel like you’re causing friction?

Hall: “We’re not causing trouble, but no one wants pop stars with principles. No one tells you how grim it all is. We’re not successful, but we’ve seen different aspects and levels of it. This grimness might change to glory. The grind and monotonous social media, relentless content might one day be worth it. I’m not sure that day ever fucking comes. You’re constantly on this fucking hamster wheel. There’s a carrot there dangling. Dressing rooms might get bigger and you might get posher crisps, but there’s nothing more depressing than a great big arena strip-light corridor. It’s all soulless and there’s nothing there. All these big stars still have to huddle around a grizzly fire exit to have a vape.

“No one really talks about the reality of the grimness, the grimness of the financial situation, the grimness that you’re going to have to get another job to sustain this – even though it is worthwhile and still a job. It doesn’t seem to have any financial worth applied to it, and that’s absolutely terrifying.”

It’s interesting what you’ve done with capping the price of gig tickets. That’s real value for money when the cost of arena and stadium gigs is rocketing…

Major: “We’re trying to remove some of the barriers of people taking a chance on a band. The ticket prices are the ones that make the least amount of difference in how much it costs to go to a gig. It’s such an honour that people give up their Friday night to see us – especially if you’re just accompanying your mate and thinking, ‘This is proper shit, I’m gonna have to do this for three hours’. Now this enables people to take more chances with live music.

“You can understand someone saving up £500 for Taylor Swift tickets because that’s not really a risk. If you’re a fan, you’re guaranteed to love every minute of that. You’re not guaranteed to love every minute of something that only costs £5 but you will be introduced to something you’ve never heard before, and it makes everyone on stage feel absolutely unbelievable that you’ve showed up. We’ve done gigs with not many people there and it’s felt like the best gig of all time because a stranger comes up to you and says, ‘That wasn’t shit’.”

Hall: “None of this should be a privilege. You shouldn’t be seeing live music as this wonder that you can only get by spending loads of money. It’s universal and should be accessible to everyone: from a stadium show to an independent venue gig. It’s not a careerist ladder to get to the top of the food chain; exciting music exists everywhere.

“You can’t compete with a 10ft flamethrower in the Old Blue Last, but you also don’t get that immediacy of being able to see into someone’s eyes.”

It’s a very punk thing to do. You could also argue that there’s nothing more ‘punk’ than making this less noise-based album?

Hall: “It’s still an angry album, maybe more so than the last one. I’ve always been completely fascinated by ‘punk’, and there’s nothing more punk rock than doing the polar opposite of what that’s supposed to look like. The more you fight against punk rock, the more punk you’re going to be. There’s also another element of punk that we’ll never be because, as much as I hate to admit it, we’re not cool! Punk needs to have an element of cool. We’re the least cool band that the NME will ever feature!”

But uncool people need to see themselves in someone to know that they’re heard, that they can do this too. That in itself is pretty cool, right? 

Hall: “What is cool? When you’ve got all these tech bros and people in the White House that look like they’ve been in the gym all morning all ‘roided up to shit, wandering around with caps on – that bro scene has died. There’s nothing cool about that.

“It’s funny that we’re not cool. Robbie might have a cool bone in his body, but I don’t. It feels like we might have had a little spin in the cool machine, but got spat out quite violently. There are no peaks or troughs – there’s no rollercoaster to our coolness.”

We interviewed The Libertines and they told us it was quite freeing to no longer be ‘cool’, so you can just focus on the songs…

Hall: “I play a set in shorts! This whole band has been a freeing experience. We’ve not been concerned with writing verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight-chorus. We know that being pro-Palestine isn’t going to get us on the radio. We’re not stupid. All these things in the mix guarantee failure, but we’re not hiding behind anything.”

Pete Doherty features on the track ‘Relentless’. What does he bring to the table?

Hall: “Again, that was about reminiscence. The more we wrote the album, the more we realised that a lot of it was about looking back on your youth when things were more innocent. Everyone looks back on the past through rose-tinted specs. You look back on Britpop and it looks amazing, but you forget about the misogyny and homophobia. You look back at the new rock revolution of The Strokes and The Libertines and that was all part of my musical education.

“It was just luck. He happened to hear me on BBC 6 Music doing a poem about my hometown of Stockton. He was playing a month later and my mate texted me to come down and meet Pete because he was going on about us. A long way down the line, I was running around with a microphone and a tape recorder trying to get him to warble something.

“When we put that out, people said that they couldn’t see the connection between us, but if you look at those lyrics and the romanticisation of ‘Albion’ and how people can integrate, the stylish kids in the riot… he’s a clever lad.”

After this record, how do you feel about your limitations? Could Benefits make a pop album?

Hall: “As long as it’s our DNA, it doesn’t really matter. Angry pop is a great genre, and we’ve got a bit of that on there.”

Anything to add?

Major: “Palestine should be free, and Donald Trump is not going to make it into his own little playground. He’s a bellend. People should buy our album, that’s more important.”

‘Constant Noise’ by Benefits is out now. The band tour the UK in April, with tickets capped at £12 and a curfew of 10pm. Visit here for tickets and more information.

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