It’s been five years since Benee released an album, which means there’s probably been about 25 normal years’ worth of topics eliciting existential terror for her to cover on the newly released Ur an Angel I’m Just Particles—not including any personal turmoil she’s undergone during this period. Yet you’d barely notice the dread beneath the foundations of these glistening alt-pop songs were it not for a few track titles immediately giving it away: “Off the Rails,” “Underwater,” “Doomsday.” “The world right now is at a cultural turning point,” she shared upon the project’s release last week, “it feels as though we are on a precipice…all we have understood and accepted about humanity and our world order seem to be on the verge of dissolution.”
Citing AI, climate change, and a near-global regression to authoritarianism as just a few inconveniences we’ve endured since the quaint days when COVID felt like the harbinger of the apocalypse, she goes on to note that Ur an Angel is intended as a series of diary entries to be gifted to anyone who shares her sense of restlessness, with these 12 songs serving less as doom-and-gloom projections of humanity’s fate and more as an optimistic outlook of where pop music is headed in the future.
With the record out now via Republic, stream along and read through Benee’s track-by-track breakdown of Ur an Angel below in which she shouts out a handful of the collaborators who helped her bring this vision to life and recounts the existential (and legal) warnings that helped shape the record.
1. “Demons”
“Demons” started in a session by playing acoustic guitar, and then I started to write the story. The song is about having an anxious episode, when you kind of feel like you’ve been taken over by a demon. It was nice to start that song with guitar because I don’t normally do that.
2. “Cinnamon”
We really wanted to make “Cinnamon” punchy and funky. Ryan Raines laid out bass, and since he’s an incredible drummer, some cool drums as well. But when it came to the chorus, I wanted it to be super ethereal and dreamy, so taking it up to that high pitch key felt like the right choice for this song. I love the contrast of how low and aggressive the vocals are compared to the chorus.
3. “Vegas”
We recorded “Vegas” in Venice, which I love as an environment to make music. Even though we’re in a studio, it still feels like we’re at the beach, so I caught an essence of that in the song with the guitars. I wanted it to sound like a beachy New Zealand guitar with the tone. I wrote the song because I almost married my boyfriend in Vegas when we were there on tour with the Wallows boys. I just love the idea of writing a song about a place, and Vegas is a place that’s unlike anywhere else, so it was a fun one to write about!
4. “Sad Boiii”
“Sad Boiii” is a song I made with Leroy Clampitt, who I love. He’s also from New Zealand, and we actually wrote this song in like a day. For this song, I especially wanted to make it sound like New Zealand kind of music, and I got Spencer Zahn to play fretless bass, which added a really cool element to the song. He played those nice jazzy chords, and it gives the song such a fucking chill, fun vibe.
5. “Prey4U”
For “Prey4U,” I brought in Matt Castellanos, who’s an amazing storyteller and really helps refine my ideas in a really interesting way. He helped me to switch the narrative from “Pray for you” to “Prey for you” in a sarcastic way to turn that narrative into being like a vulture picking on this person’s heart.
6. “Chainmail”
On “Chainmail,” I kept rewriting the verses and changing the melodies because that song took a while to make it perfect. I love this song, and I wanted to step into an emo bag, and I think we did a good job at that. It’s a vibe song, and I’m glad it exists on the album because it doesn’t sound like any of the other songs.
7. “Doomsday”
When we made “Doomsday,” I wanted to write about how apocalyptic COVID felt. You’d message your loved ones because it felt so crazy, we didn’t know what was gonna happen, and we didn’t know if everyone was OK. It was a very uncertain kind of time. But I loved the idea of writing this creative story of meeting someone at a lake before the end of the world. I love the guitars and had a lot of fun writing it to be so pretty and dreamy. In the chorus, I actually got a kid’s choir in New Zealand to lay vocals, which brought a beautiful and kind of surreal vibe to the song.
8. “Underwater”
“Underwater” took a long time to get it perfect production-wise, because it originally sounded extremely muffled, like it was actually underwater. It was only until we made some elements break through the production that I felt like it was perfect. It’s a sad song, but it sounds like it could be played in the club, which I love.
9. “Off the Rails”
“Off the Rails” I made with two badass female producers, Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjard, and we wrote it pretty quickly. I just wanted to capture feminine rage, and I think we did a perfect job of that. It was influenced by those anti-piracy ads that used to play in cinemas: “You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a train...dun, dun, dun, dun.”
10. “Animal”
I wrote “Animal” when I was feeling extra existential. We basically just wanted to make this existential, whirlwind song. I was inspired from flying on a plane and looking down and seeing everything below me look like ants. It felt like such a crazy concept I wanted to write about.
11. “Princess”
“Princess” is a song we wrote in, like, 40 minutes after the “Chainmail” session and were like, “Should we just write another one quickly?” Sly Sivertsen made this Jersey beat, and then I just freestyled. I knew I wanted a feature for the song, and that’s where PinkPantheress sent me a post-chorus verse, which just makes the song so much better.
12. “Heaven”
“Heaven” is one of my favorites. I wrote this song with Josh Fountain in Aotearoa, New Zealand on an island called Waiheke Island. Just being in the forest, you can hear that influence. This is a really beautiful song that I wrote about losing my granddad, and I love how it concludes the album. I hope you guys love it.
