"They would literally laugh in my face": From Haitian voodoo to slavery, sex and school shootings, Lower is the album Benjamin Booker's old label didn't want him to make

(Image credit: Trenity Thomas)

It’s been a long break since his last album, bluesy garage rocker Witness, but Benjamin Booker is back with Lower, this time experimenting in noise rock and contemporary indie hip-hop – and some weighty subject matter. Now the proud head of his own label, he’s enjoying a new level of artistic freedom.

It’s seven years since your last record. What have you been doing?

I was just working on music. I had a specific idea of what I wanted to do for this record, so it was really just about following through and getting there. I spent a couple years trying to figure out what I wanted to do. It was different to other things that I’ve done, because there was a clear vision of what I wanted, and it wasn’t easy for me to get to.

What was that vision?

I’ve been listening to eighties UK indie stuff, noise pop, stuff like My Bloody Valentine, The Cure and Jesus And Mary Chain. And I was listening to a lot of indie hip-hop and ambient music from today, and just trying to figure out how to put all of these things together in a cohesive way.

Benjamin Booker - SAME KIND OF LONELY (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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How do you even begin to bring that sort of stuff together?

I started painting more and getting more into visual art, and learning more about art history, which made me think a lot more about music history. So I spent a lot of time studying the history of recording, which is so short, but just seeing what people had done with hip-hop and what things hadn’t been done in hip-hop – you don’t really hear distortion in hip-hop music.

What were you influenced by lyrically?

I was reading Book Of Longing by Leonard Cohen. I liked the simplicity of the poems, but how they felt so spiritual, there was a depth to them. And I’m a very big Dylan fan. Those people use a lot of biblical allusions in their work, and my song LWA In The Trailer Park is referencing Haitian voodoo. Every song, I was trying to write about something that I didn’t think had really been written about before. But also, there’s songs like Rebecca Latimer Felton Takes A BBC, which is referencing pornography and slavery.

Benjamin Booker - SLOW DANCE IN A GAY BAR (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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Rebecca Latimer Felton was the first woman to serve in the United States Senate, and was pro-slavery and pro-lynching. Why did you want to reference her?

I had been reading about Jeremy O. Harris, this playwright who has a play called Slave Play, which examines slavery and interracial relationships and sex. I like to look through Library Of Congress catalogues, so I was learning about her, I was thinking about Jeremy O. Harris. I had wanted to incorporate pornography into a song. And they all came together.

The song Same Kind Of Lonely is genuinely disturbing. Where is the audio clip of shooting from?

It’s from a school shooting. The clip is this violent thing that kind of hits you in the music. But that’s how those things hit us in real life. They just come out of nowhere.

This is your first record on your own label. How do you find being a label boss?

I love it. There’s things that I’m doing now, where I would say it to people at labels and they would literally laugh in my face. I don’t even have to have those discussions any more. It’s just done, no questions.

Lower is out now via Fire Next Time Records.

Emma has been writing about music for 25 years, and is a regular contributor to Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog and Louder. During that time her words have also appeared in publications including Kerrang!, Melody Maker, Select, The Blues Magazine and many more. She is also a professional pedant and grammar nerd and has worked as a copy editor on everything from film titles through to high-end property magazines. In her spare time, when not at gigs, you’ll find her at her local stables hanging out with a bunch of extremely characterful horses.