Benefits announce second album and share Pete Doherty collaboration, "Relentless"

After releasing their debut album, NAILS, last 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. We felt there was no point in just repeating the first album. We’ve never been ones for simply sticking in our lane, plus, it’s been a tough few years - I’ve forgotten how many times we’ve been praised and written off in equal measure. This band is a battle."

Rather than split up, what the band did instead was re-calibrate. After a going through a succession of drummers, Benefits have now settled as a two-piece made up of Hall and electronic virtuoso Robbie Major.

“We’re still angry and “Constant Noise” is an angry album,” says Hall, “just angry in a different way to before. There’s plenty of bands around who are more overt and obvious in their rage - just as we were on our debut - and that’s fine, we just wanted to develop something beyond that. We wanted to create something almost joyous in its disgust at the world. If the previous record was black and white, we wanted this to be technicolour.”

Speaking on the single and the collaboration, Hall says: “The song is about craving for a past you had that exists perhaps solely in your memory. Yearning your lost youth, when things seemed easier. Getting Peter Doherty involved was important not just because he’s a legendary performer but also because he was a hero to both of us when we were getting into music, linking in with the theme of the song. Peter and the Libertines were integral to our musical education and love of music, like it or not, he’s a hugely important factor as to why we do what we do. He’s part of our past and we’re honoured and humbled that he agreed to participate in our future.”