Video: Benjamin Booker Shares New Single 'SAME KIND OF LONELY'

Benjamin Booker shares a new single “SAME KIND OF LONELY,” which arrives with a stark music video, from his first new album in 7 years, LOWER. The album, co-produced by Booker with underground hip-hop mastermind Kenny Segal (Armand Hammer, billy woods), is due January 24, 2025 on FIRE NEXT TIME RECORDS via Thirty Tigers.

In a recent profile, Rolling Stone said “‘SAME KIND OF LONELY’ settles somewhere nearly beatific within the cascading fuzz of its guitars, arriving at an atmospheric bridge where Booker’s modest incantation — “I’m looking for the real thing, though, you know” — is interrupted suddenly by a burst of gunfire. The audio, he says, is sampled from a video of a school shooting. It’s followed closely by the sound of his daughter laughing. It’s an extremely bold choice, and one Booker pulls off. The shock never fades, even on repeated listens, when you know what to expect. Booker says he included this audio because those random moments of horror ‘happen in our lives, just out of nowhere.”

Of the song and video Booker says “I was thinking a lot about existence and the natural world—how things that start off so beautiful are often twisted into something unsettling or sinister. Maybe the disconnect between the natural state of things and the modified state of things is the source of a lot of pain, suffering and loneliness in the world.

For this video, one of the things we were interested in looking at is our twisting and distortion of ourselves and the world. The co-director, Gerry Cisneros, and I tried to express this idea through visuals—slowly turning algae on a lake into digital needles or having eyes appear in trees. We wanted to take nature and find ways to manipulate it. We were inspired by Haitian Vodou ceremonies, the paintings of Paul Gaugin, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, and Andrei Tarkovsky."

Earlier this fall Booker announced LOWER with its explosive lead single “LWA IN THE TRAILER PARK.” The track is emblematic of the New Orleans-based artist’s mixing of experimental and lo-fi hip hop, dream and noise pop, ambient and indie rock into something that is entirely his own. Through the changes, Booker’s lyrical self-exploration of pain and longing have been persistent, exploring themes of isolation, anger, race and spirituality in the modern age. LOWER marks the first release on Booker’s new label, FIRE NEXT RECORDS and his first co-production of his solo work.

While his previous releases dabbled in fuzzy americana-inspired garage rock and 70’s glam, LOWER presents a grittier and raw sound that Booker had been searching for for years while digging into niche music scenes and ultimately filtering them through his unique pop lens. “I wanted to get to this sound, but I didn’t know how. At some point I decided I’m going to find it or die trying.” Booker credits Segal as instrumental to this search, trading stems via email while Booker was in Australia. “Kenny was the missing piece I needed--he fills in all of my gaps. I don’t know what I’ll do next, but if I can imagine it, I can do it now.”

Photo Credit: Alex Edep

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