New Music
New Music: Brooke Bentham
The British singer and songwriter announces Dublin headline show this May as part of Eastbound Festival
Eastbound Presents Brooke Bentham
Brooke Bentham released her debut album Everyday Nothing on AllPoints last Friday 28 February. The album follows two EPs of music shored up by intense reflection, which has earned the 23 year old many admirers and a rapidly growing fanbase.
Brooke writes sharp and eloquent songs about her experiences as she understands them, using words and music to resolve and record the tensions of young adulthood. Confronted with the mundanities of life and caught between two jobs in London, she finds intense lyricism in the struggle for purpose and direction.
The album is, in her words, “in part an ode to the little moments in life, the frustration of being young and unaware of what you want but getting older and realising you still don’t know. It’s an album I searched for myself in, filled with questions I asked myself.”
Perform For You
Her second single, ‘Perform For You’, is a melancholy meditation on the power dynamics in toxic relationships. Inspired by novels that Brooke was reading at the time. She probes beneath the surface of a doomed romance from the get-go. “It’s like surrendering to something, even though you know it’s never going to work, realising you’re so dependent on someone and knowing your presence in that relationship. It’s love in the worst way.” she says.
“‘Perform For You’ is probably my favourite, because it reminds me of lots of the music I love. Once we’d recorded that, I knew we were making an album. Musically it was exactly where I wanted to be.”
All My Friends Are Drunk
“Perform For You” follows “All My Friends Are Drunk” released last October which was the first taster of Everyday Nothing. A looser indie rock sound than her previous EPs pitched somewhere between Mazzy Star, Yo La Tengo, Sparklehorse and early Angel Olsen and nods to the ‘90s rock bands she was listening to leading up to the album being written, notably Low, Yo La Tengo and Broadcast.
Everyday Nothing soundtracks the reality for many young people today. One in which hopes and dreams play out in a haze of confusion and frustration. Brooke captures this existential vulnerability, the baffling day to day-ness of a young life in the most relatable, poetic and compelling of works. “A lot of life is boring and predictable, but I hope this album is a way of saying that with some charm.”
