Benee On 'You’re An Angel, I’m Just Particles'
From emotional debris and dreamy synth strings.
Benee builds atmospheres as she builds songs, small planets stitched from emotional debris and dreamy synth strings, then walks us through them in armor made of duct tape and existential wonder. That’s the energy behind You’re An Angel, I’m Just Particles, her most experimental work yet, and somehow also her most honest.
We sat with Benee, charming foster kitten chaos, and the unmistakable air of an artist who just hit her quarter-life awakening. She laughed at her own uncertainty, something we all should aspire as the world grows with chaos. She refused to fake clarity. And she held every moment with open palms, like someone who understands that “growing up” isn’t a slogan. It’s a process of deep thought, with a sprinkle of class.
“Maybe it’s just the frontal lobe fully developing,” she shrugged warmly at one point. Funny, but deeply true. This album sounds like that moment when your mind stretches just far enough to scare you.
Transendence, or unraveling?
Benee insists she wasn’t chasing transcendence. She was simply writing through whatever her brain was doing at the time. The existential thread revealed itself after the songs were finished. Only then did the visuals arrive, sculptural armor, emotional cycles, chapters named Obsession, Breakdown, Chaos, Ascent.
She doesn’t force narrative. She discovers it.
“I wasn’t trying to write about transcendence. I kind of realized that’s what I was already doing.”
Even her visual process mirrors this. On tour, filming the Cinnamon video, she’d spot a random pile of brown dirt in Copenhagen and think... there. That’s the world of this song. She didn’t need a studio or a budget. She needed intuition and a camera.
The collaboration crucible
Moving from New Zealand to LA cracked something open. The music industry, especially its producer landscape, hit her with speed-date culture and identity whiplash.
“It can be really uncomfortable and I don’t really like it, to be honest.”
But in finding collaborators like Luca Klosser and Elvira Anderfjord, the only women producers on the album, something magical happened: ease, relatability, deeper grounding. The album may experiment wildly, but it’s built on the simple relief of genuine connection.
When the song finds its center
Asked how she knows a song isn’t just orbiting an emotion, but actually finding it, she didn’t offer theory. She offered instinct. It happens when the visual appears. When a sound enters that wasn’t planned. When her friend sends back a cello part and she quietly cries ten times listening to it. That's music at it's best, raw emotion.
“I knew I didn’t want any more vocals in that part. It had to stay instrumental.
The album ends with Heaven, begins with Demons, and plays out like the mental breakdown we’ve all learned to hide behind Spotify playlists and self-care memes. Benee didn’t hide. She itemized it.
The songs that hold the album together
She name-dropped two anchors:
- Chainmail – a response to the world’s constant noise, and the armor we build just to function
- Doomsday – her apocalyptic heartbeat during the COVID era
Both songs tilt toward existential realizations, but never without emotion. Never without truth we all live.
What Benee taught us
Pop music is supposed to sparkle. Benee’s still does, it just sparkles like stars seen from the bottom of a canyon. This is post-growth-spurt pop, not moodboard pop. The kind that makes you wonder what your own brain is building behind your back.
She said something else I haven’t been able to shake:
“Sometimes people at hardcore gigs… smashing their heads… are having the best time. Because the music is so intense it pulls the emotion out of you.”
Consider this album her version of that, a gentle headbang at the edge of the void. And honestly? It chimes like freedom.
Connect with Facebook