The Bennies: Natural Born Chillers
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The Bennies: Natural Born Chillers

Dropping a ‘musical transmission from Melbourne to outer space’, The Bennies are back with new single ‘Get High Like An Angel’, the first single from the forth-coming LP Natural Born Chillers, an album which marks the most refined sound ever released by the band.

“The songs on this album are a bit more straight up,” reveals Anty Horgan, the groups lead vocalist and party extraordinaire. “With Wisdom Machine we tried to throw in a lot of different sounds, whereas this album is a lot more refined, so it’s pretty sonically different.”

Drawing reference to the albums title track Horgan continues, “The actual song ‘Natural Born Chillers’ is the first song we have ever written that is a straight up Ska song. It stays the same tempo the whole way through which is in some ways the most straightforward song we have written, and that’s something new for us.

“A lot of the time when we are writing, we feed ourselves that people will get bored of a vibe or tempo so we change it and make it different. This time around, we are a lot more consistent with the sound of the song,” he admits.

Horgan also spoke about the forthcoming track ‘Trip Report’ which features three of the band members telling anecdotes, highlighting their view on the “human condition” before going into a party chant that’ll take festival season by storm.

“That’s one of my favourites; I actually reckon it’s the weirdest song we have ever written, it makes me laugh every time,” he smiles.

“It was a bit of a Frankenstein track as it was a loop that’s been kicking around for ages. I played it to Jeff Rosenstock when he was at my house one day and I was saying ‘I love this song but I don’t know where to go from here’ and he said ‘Well why don’t you guys just sing along the bass line’ so that is where that chant originated from.”

With an upcoming tour about to start, The Bennies haven’t taken the time to slow down. Instead they are already hard at work with another new album.

“We were excited about the idea of putting an album out at the start of the year and then another one later on in the year. We didn’t do a whole lot this year so we really wanted to try and put out two next year.”

Natural Born Chillers will be released next February and in typical fashion for The Bennies, the collaged album cover designed by Horgan draws attention to a rather big nugget of weed.

“I love collage art and have recently got into it a lot. I was fucking around with a few designs and after a while Chris – my housemate who is the drummer of the Smith Street Band – suggested to the other guys that I do the artwork and they were all really into it. It was cool as I did this cover and my dad did the cover for Wisdom Machine,” he explains.

“The nugget on the front was kind of funny, I tried replacing it with a few things like a disco ball and stuff, but the green of the nugg looked the nicest so we talked about it and thought, ‘we all love weed, we sing about it a lot, why would we hide it from the cover?’ Fuck That.”

When & Where: Karova Lounge, Ballarat – November 22.

Written by Alex Callan