Benefits: ‘Repeating ourselves would have been a f***ing waste of time’

“There’s an old David Bowie quote where he talks about swimming,” ponders Benefits‘ Kingsley Hall. “It’s the idea that you should go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

According to Hall, it’s a mantra that propelled the Teesside noisemakers forward – now a duo between himself and bandmate Robbie Major – when it came to creating their second album Constant Noise which arrives this Friday (March 21).

Hall’s attention grabbing state-of-the-nation polemics are still at the heart of their songs, but it’s clear they’ve flipped up the sonic palette somewhat, resulting in a situation where the album’s title is subtly tongue in cheek. If their first album turned things up to eleven at every opportunity, there’s something more understated at play here, with Dream-like synths and doom-laden disco being the sonic palette they choose to serve up.

“Repeating ourselves just would have been an absolute fucking waste of time,” explains Hall. “It would have been so boring, and I don’t think Robbie would be that interested in it. I think it’s just a question of being there and done that.”

Hall adds that the record’s producers – James Welsh and James Adrian Brown – helped to deliver “their own take on how we should develop our sound”.

Even if that’s a difference of sorts, it’s clear that the fire in Hall’s belly burns as brightly as ever. “Personally it’s a lot angrier than the previous record, but less so in the cartoonish way that the first might have been seen as,” he explains.

“I’m looking up at a mountain of shit,” comes Hall’s opening salvo on the title track – a haunting, understated riposte against the sheer futility of fighting with anonymous strangers online.

Elsewhere, there’s a genuinely unsettling monk-like choir on ‘The Brambles’ – which sees Hall tackle the reality of half-dead high-streets in northern towns that have been neglected and fallen foul of successive governments.

“A discarded wheelie bin, a smashed in shelter, the usual cliche of urban decay,” he reflects, softly. So a flip-up of sorts (bar the searing ‘Lies and Fear’), but Hall admits there’s a practical reason too.

“My voice is fucked!” he quips. “Even if I wanted to write a load of songs where we’re shouting again, my voice is fucking destroyed. There’s one shouty song on the album, but the vast majority don’t involve that, but it came at a time when we wanted to evolve.”

And there’s even a pinch-me moment too, Hall explains, in the form of a spoken-word cameo from Pete Doherty on ‘Relentless’. “I worked in a call centre in the 2000s and I would sit there doing the NME crossword every Thursday, reading about Pete,” he recalls. “I think it’s a brilliant, much maligned era of rock music, English rock music.”

Doherty first reached out to the group after hearing them on BBC 6 Music, sparking an unlikely friendship..

“I think a lot of songs look back to that golden age of thinking you’re infinite and you’re indestructible. So getting someone who was involved in making those sounds initially seemed too good an opportunity to miss.”

So, cameos from indie royalty and a new sound to boot. Benefits, to paraphrase the Thin White Duke, have truly jumped into the deep end.