BENEE On Her Debut Album, The Song Her Mum Hates, And Turning Jokes Into Huge Hits
BENEE's 'Hey u x' arrives as one of the most anticipated albums of the year - and it lives up to the hype.
“My mum hates that song so much,” BENEE laughs, talking about ‘Plain’, a diss-track about an ex’s average new girlfriend, featuring verses from Lily Allen and Flo Milli.
It’s one of the only sour notes on Stella Bennett’s debut album, Hey u x, which is why her mum objects, though she’s supportive enough, later ‘interrupting’ our Zoom with unnecessary apologies to give her daughter a neck-rub. She’s been staring at computers a lot in the last few weeks, thanks to chats like this.
A sore neck’s the hazard of releasing your album while tucked away from COVID-19 in Auckland, though Bennett is pretty happy that she gets to wear sweatpants if she wants, rather than have to get dressed up and look super cool for press.
“In the lyrics I’m putting down another woman and that is not at all anything that I stand for,” Bennet says. “And I’m not writing about like a particular person… It was more, I feel like sometimes when like you’re sad or you have like an ex or something and you just want to feel like a bad bitch.”
It’s not exactly a bad bitch anthem, though: sure, Flo and Lily have that energy in their verses, but if BENEE (pronounced like ‘…And The Jets’, by the way) is trying to follow suit, it’s not exactly working. Softly sung lines like “oh, you went out with that/that makes me real sad” aren’t terribly biting — it’s more like Flo and Lily are her friends trying to talk trash Bennett’s ex so she stops watching his girlfriend’s Instagram stories, unable to stop.
Hey u x is filled with confessions those not immediately obvious on first listen. Smash single ‘Supalonely’, truly one of TikTok’s biggest songs, is a heart-break wallow dressed up into sunny disco-pop, making fun of being a mopey sad girl. It’s shrewd songwriting, where listeners can switch layers depending on what they need.
Over an album that shifts genre, from D&B to guitar ballads and synth-odes to snails, BENEE holds things together with idiosyncratic quirks, whether that be an odd line (“I’m a snail/you’re a guy”) or surprise flamenco flair (‘Same Effect’).
“I like the idea that my voice can be the thing that ties it all together and then I can sing on any kind of a beat,” she says. “And then it just be the vocals and my writing style that makes it familiar. That’s what I think bunches it all together and makes it kind of work, even though it is like organised chaos.”
‘I Joked About It, And Then I Did It’
BENEE may have blown up thanks to ‘Supalonely’ soundtracking a TikTok dance-challenge at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (its title alone sums up the moment), but she’s been steadily honing her craft for years.
Still in high school, Bennett began popping up tracks on Soundcloud in 2017: eventually, they caught the attention of producer Josh Fountain, who she worked on with ‘Soaked’ and ‘Tough Guy’ in 2017, two slick R&B tracks that were both picked up on triple j rotation.
She quickly signed with Republic Records, and in 2019, released two EPs: Fire On Marzz and Stella & Steve, which both ran with the flecks of fun found in the odd samples of ‘Soaked’, toning down the emphasis on proving Bennet’s vocal range in favour of quirk-driven production and line delivery. Bennett has a soulful voice, but plays with inflection and pronunciation, mumbling or sticking the Kiwi accent on strong: it adds a sense of effortless to the songs, as she can fool around and still sound great.
That comes across on Hey u x, where Bennett is clearly not concerned with re-creating the smash success of ‘Supalonely’: most of the album’s far more mellow, or goes in the other direction. ‘Sheesh’ stands out a lot, a drum and base track made by someone born in 2000, where the piano-lines seem pulled from DDR and have a Grimes feature on top: it’s a lot of influences all at once, but it’s infectious.
“I always kind of joked about making a drum and base song myself,” she says. “But I feel like if I told myself last year, like, you know, there’s gotta be D&B song [on Hey u x], I would’ve been like, ‘shut up!’. But I joked about it and then I did it because I wanted to.”
There’s a lot of confidence in following through with a throw-away idea, and its how Bennett wrote a few of the tracks.
“They have been [jokes], like ‘Supalonely’ and ‘Snail’. That was literally me in lockdown [saying] I’m going to write a song about a snail and taking that into a studio. And then I wrote about a snail and the global pandemic. So I feel like I’m always kind of joking about doing stuff and then I actually do it.”
“I have pretty bad anxiety and I often feel like in [those] social situations that I embarrassed myself.”
Some, of course, came from bigger conversations. Opener ‘Happen To Me’ is Bennett’s favourite track, which by Hey u‘s standards is a pretty straight-forward song about her fears and anxieties in having early success, sung over a guitar and drum-line reminiscent of The King Of Limbs.
But ‘Kool’ might strike the biggest chord, an ode to those who appear so confident and carefree in perfect outfits: “I wish I could be cool like you,” she sings, equal parts biting dig and earnest admiration. Bennett’s met a lot of industry types and ‘cool’ people in the past few years, and the song both builds off feeling unsure in the room and feeling unsure of the room, too.
“I didn’t say this in the song, but I was kind of thinking when I was writing it — are they really, you know, happy and comfortable with themselves? Or maybe they’re also super, super insecure and have anxiety,” she says.
“I have pretty bad anxiety and I often feel like in [those] social situations that I embarrassed myself…. I guess it was another self-deprecating song, which seems to be like a theme that I like to keep going [with].”
I point out to Bennett that she’s probably that ‘cool’ figure in the room to some people, too: not to suggest that she’s ‘made it’, but just how subjective the idea is, even if it can feel impossible to avoid.
“Yeah, and I think that the coolest people are people who you can tell are super happy with themselves. They’re weird and they seem comfortable,” she says. “…I guess like someone thinking that I’m cool, it seems so weird to me because I feel so uncool every-day. But I guess, yeah, that could be the same, exactly the same for the people that I’m writing about.”
BENEE’s debut album Hey u, x is out now via Republic Records.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Music Junkee, and freelancer who has written for The Guardian, The Big Issue and more. He’s on Twitter.