Benefits unveil new single, “Land Of The Tyrants”

“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.”

Zera Tønin, the singer of queerpop-electro duo Arch Femmesis, additionally provides guest vocals on the track after they supported Benefits in Nottingham and captivated the band. “In the first song their singer, Zera Tønin, came out masked in a wedding veil and did the most intense, horrifying and strangely musical scream I’ve ever heard” says Hall.

“It stuck with me for months and the more we wrote and recorded Land of the Tyrants the more it became obvious that the entire song should revolve around that amazing vocal hook. There was no way I could do something as otherworldly as what we’d heard in the Rescue Rooms so Zera agreed to come up with something new for our song. Again, as is tradition with Benefits, it was recorded remotely with no engineer, in a front room.”