Benjamin Booker’s third album wakes up in a cold sweat, its narrator gripped by paranoia in the American surveillance state while a booming backbeat pounds at his temples. It ends with a hopeless alcoholic swearing to himself that tomorrow will be different instead of exactly like the night before. In between, Booker addresses homelessness, the psychosexual underpinnings of slavery and adopts a pitch-shifted, demonic vocal on “Speaking With The Dead” that would have made for a far more effective soundtrack to Sinners than the actual thing. Along with co-producer Kenny Segal, Booker aspired to have Lower triangulate Mobb Deep’s Hell On Earth and The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Psychocandy, two wildly divergent exemplars of bad vibes music.
The 36-year old New Orleans native swears he has no idea of how he’s perceived by his listeners, and here’s the most damning evidence: he really thought Lower would be the soundtrack to summertime cookouts and dorm room smoke sessions by now. “I guess I didn’t realize how depressing it was,” he jokes without really laughing.
Lower is a lot of things — harrowing, haunting, hummable, and the best album of 2025. But it is not chill in any way.
It also bears little resemblance to the music that made Booker a festival fixture throughout most of the 2010s. I’m talking to Booker six months after the initial release of Lower because — full disclosure — prior to 2025, I had only heard his music in bits and pieces but was firmly aware of his “deal”: a guy who opened for Jack White after putting out a live album on Third Man, getting signed to ATO Records, and working within the same realm as Alabama Shakes and Hurray For The Riff Raff: tasteful, rootsy, and politically minded rock music that neatly toes the line between NPR and Pitchfork readers. And then he mostly just disappeared since the release of Witness in 2017. “I mean, besides hanging out with my family and making music, I have no other activities,” Booker admits during our Zoom conversation.
This was not a situation where an artist completely went off the grid or lost his mind; Booker did take up painting and skateboarding while trying to make ten other songs as strong as “Slow Dance In A Gay Bar,” a woozy character study that served as proof of concept for Lower‘s radical reinvention. He found a co-conspirator in Kenny Segal, best known for his claustrophobic production work on Billy Woods’ twin masterpieces Hiding Places and Maps. “Kenny and I linked up in 2020 and he pretty much immediately understood what I was trying to do,” Booker explains. “The simplest way I had explained it was how Radiohead had taken IDM and incorporated it into rock music on OK Computer. I wanted to take his experimental hip-hop world and merge that with indie rock and he pretty much got it immediately.”
Leading up to the recording of Lower, Booker would often find himself singing over the eerie, molten beats of Hell On Earth, and “Slow Dance” was created in the same way, layering sultry croaks over Segal’s longing guitar samples; Booker didn’t touch a single instrument on the track. It’s gorgeous, but unnerving, with Booker’s romantic reveries (“I could find a good man / start a modern family”) set against the abject loneliness of the chorus (“I just want someone to see me”). This is how Lower operates, as even the most accessible moments have a disturbing undertone, most notably the field recording of a school shooting that interrupts the fuzzed-out soul of “Same Kind Of Lonely.” These were the risks Booker had to commit to honor the inspiration he took from massive cultural statements like Solange’s A Seat At The Table and Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs.
It’s no surprise that Booker tastes in rap and R&B veer towards “critically acclaimed”; in a stunning role reversal, this is the first person I’ve ever talked to who became a musician after a stint as a frustrated music journalist. Though Booker honed his skills interviewing punk bands as a University Of Florida undergrad, he soon realized the disadvantage of attending an SEC school in a field that pays poverty wages while requiring an elite education. “I applied to a million magazines and didn’t get any internships,” he sighs. “And I had a bass player from Brown who had gotten literally every single internship that I applied for.”
Fortunately, Booker was soon diverted to a career path that was only slightly more stable than that of “music journalist.” He admits that Lower couldn’t exist without the success of his previous two albums, as well as the financial cushion that came with it. But even if his goal was to make a record on the level of Solange or Frank Ocean, it’s not to become them. “When I finished this record, I felt like I finally checked off all the things on my list of things I wanted to do with an album,” he states. “The goal is to exist like Harry Dean Stanton, whatever the equivalent of the character actor is in music. I think most people would want that.”
When I think back on “Witness,” that struck me as a classic protest song for the political atmosphere of Trump 1.0 — the message, the defiance, the Mavis Staples feature. Eight years later, a lot of the same problems remain and things seem even more bleak. How has your view of the world evolved with it?
I think when I was making the first album [Benjamin Booker], it was very “early 20s,” angsty, angry, more like lashing out at other people with the songs. By the time I got to the second album [Witness], I was older and it felt more reflective, looking inward at the problems that you are causing. Instead of going inward, this one was looking out, trying to paint pictures, not to really give answers or anything like that, because I don’t believe there are answers to any of these things. I started painting more over the time between the last album, and I think that’s where my head was at. It was more about the image of the song, where it was more about the message before.
I find that as artists age and the answers don’t seem to come as easily as they did in their 20s, they start exploring more of a spiritual side. Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?
I’m very… kind of traumatized from religion. Like, if I walk into a church, I almost get panic attacks. Well, I can go into Catholic churches, I like going to those kinds of places. But evangelical Christianity, it was honestly just scarring for me as a kid. My mom and I lived in Virginia Beach, which is where CBN is, the Christian Broadcasting Network. There was a big Christian school there, it was a very conservative town, and I was one of those kids that was just on church pews every day. When I was 10, I played a demon in a church play dragging gay people to hell. I did that.
I wonder if any of those people have followed your career and heard “Slow Dance In A Gay Bar.”
Oh yeah. [With spirituality], I think that the music is the force. If I’m going towards anything, it’s just trying to make more powerful music because when the songs are done, you don’t even understand how it got to this place. To me, that’s the thing. It’s just like, how far can I go? What can I get to at the end? How far can I push this in that direction? That’s what music always was, like a religious kind of thing. When I was younger, I listened to a lot of blues, old stuff. But I honestly never really connected to the music that much. I can’t play blues. I never bothered to learn to play that kind of music. But when I got older, I realized, “Oh, I’m a young Black kid. I’m not very connected to my parents. And here are these experienced, older Black men who’ve lived these lives, talking about life and the way that the world really is.” That’s how I also got into punk. I was looking for a way of living, that’s what I was looking for in the music.
Have you seen Sinners?
I did see it. I had very low expectations for that kind of thing, but I thought it was pretty good. I really don’t have anything bad to say about it… but I think it could have been shorter.
I bring that up because Sinners is the first time in a while where the blues are treated as a contemporary form of music rather than as an abstract signifier of “authenticity.” There’s one whiskey ad that always autoplays for me on YouTube that compares itself to an “old blues 45.” That really works for people and for better or worse, I feel like the first two records really caught on that kind of scene. Lower is a very aggressive way of leaving that “rootsy indie rock” world behind, but I’m wondering if you saw other younger artists in that world feeling boxed in the same way as you did.
I don’t think that a lot of people approach music that way. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in music from a career perspective. But most of the musicians I’ve met over the years are like, “This worked, I’m gonna ride it out.” They’re boxing themselves in. That was crazy to me. After the second record, I had made a little bit of money and thought, “Great, now I get to take time and do whatever I wanna do.” I’ll just use this to make the record that I’ve always wanted to make. But around me, I knew people who were millionaires who seemed kind of down about the music. But I was like, why don’t you just make whatever you wanna make? You have millions of dollars. Music is like something I really, truly love and has always been there for me, it’s the only thing that it’s been pure.
Having taken eight years between records, I’ve wondered whether you’ve worked mostly on getting these eleven songs right or if there’s a huge archive of outtakes.
I made a lot of really, really bad songs leading up to this record, probably multiple albums worth. There was stuff like, “This is it, like I’ve made a whole record,” and then got rid of them. It just took a long time to figure out the sound I wanted. The constant thing that I go through is that you make [a lot of] songs and then you write one song that’s so much better than the other ones. What do you do with that? You got to get rid of the other ones. With my favorite artists, their songs really don’t go below a certain baseline, you know what I mean? “Slow Dance In A Gay Bar” was the first song that we did and then it was like, “Oh man, like, the songs have to be as good as this song.”
How did the division of labor play out between you and Kenny?
All of the drums and bass that you hear on the record is Kenny. I play almost all of the guitars, some keyboards, and it really was sending stuff back and forth. “Slow Dance In A Gay Bar” is the only one in the whole album that is literally just Kenny. He sent me that [instrumental] and I just sang over it. But then there’s songs like “Show And Tell” and “Same Kind Of Lonely” and “Black Opps” where I’d send him demos. There’s a Dilla song called “Stepson Of The Clapper,” I did a demo where I chopped up that beat and then played guitar over it and sent that to him. A lot of times, I would send beat ideas and he would do a better version of the drums. One of the reasons I wanted to work with him was because he doesn’t do samples from records. He was into the idea of getting players, sampling players, and then doing it like that.
After doing a co-production on the last Armand Hammer album, have you considered doing more production for other artists?
I think I’m just too selfish. Anytime that I think about doing anything else, I just think about how it’s gonna take away from my own thing. The people who I really love the most are just kind of like, “You can’t spread yourself too thin,” you know what I mean?
I think back to the point where Timbaland was clearly outsourcing his beats, same with the second wave of Wu-Tang solo projects where RZA had his protégés do RZA-style beats while he learned how to play actual strings.
He did like a whole orchestra show recently.
[imitates Billy Woods on “Spider Hole”] I don’t wanna see RZA with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
It’s hilarious, my manager works for Wu-Tang and when we were practicing for this last tour, he asked me if I wanted to go see RZA do this orchestra thing. And Annie and Michaela, who play in the band, both told me that line.
You mentioned that Kenny wasn’t really a Mobb Deep guy, that he was more into Gang Starr and while most people in 2025 would likely think of them as “’90s NYC hip-hop,” there really was a distinction between those artists at the time, where one was “street rap” and the other was “lyrical.”
When I was growing up, the only rap that I was exposed to basically was the pop stuff, Nelly and things like that. I had no connection to it at all and it wasn’t until the whole newer wave of people like [Billy] Woods like Ka and Earl [Sweatshirt] came along. Once Some Rap Songs came out, that was a real mind-blowing moment for me. It was one of the only experiences that I’ve had listening to a record where it was immediately like, “Nothing sounds like this.” The thing that’s so great about it is how fucked up the production is, it’s so muddy and, like, terrible, it’s such a “fuck you” to anybody who does any kind of recording. But I think it only works because he was already big and when you’re big, you can do anything. If somebody else and put that out, you’d be like, “That’s terrible.” There were a lot of records that came out during that time that were kind of just like… I had to do something else. Within a few years, we had Black Messiah, Pinata, A Seat At The Table. Albums that were massive Black statements, where you’re just like, “This person put everything into the album.” You don’t really get those all the time, I can’t think of one recently.
Now that it’s been over a decade since most of those albums came out, it’s easier for me to see them as formative experiences for a newer generation, the way Aquemini or Voodoo or The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill were for people my age. And because of that, I have to believe something like that is happening for people in their teens right now.
I would say some of the most interesting music ever made is being made now, but it’s just impossible to find it. You have the labels looking for the most middle-of-the-road things to put out. When you think about the biggest indie acts now, something like Phoebe Bridgers, what’s the purpose of this? What does this bring to the table? Obviously, it’s the way that algorithms and having to use social media to get signed to labels pushes people towards those things. It’s not that there hasn’t always been middle-of-the-road stuff, I’m saying that’s the stuff on the surface. There’s plenty of amazing things that are always happening.
Now that you’ve started your own label, are you interested in signing other artists?
Oh no. I don’t really know what I would do for another record because it’s just more business stuff now than I would ever want to deal with. I would almost give up some of the freedom that I have now to just not think about any of those kinds of things. It was just kind of nonstop. In independent music, there’s so many bullshit things in the middle of you and getting to people. If you want an endcap at Rough Trade Records in New York, it costs $1,000 to do that. Or hearing from the distributors, “We need to put up posters in all the stores.” The kind of things where, first of all, I don’t think that any of this matters anymore. I feel like independent labels know that they have lost control and don’t really know what’s happening, but they haven’t found a solution yet. So it’s still kind of a mess.
I’m always frustrated at the shaming that goes on in “DIY culture” because it assumes that someone who’s good at playing guitar has a skill set that also transfers to booking shows or accounting.
I will say that the biggest people I’ve met are really business-minded people as well. It’s very rare that I meet somebody who’s successful in music and is not very on top of that kind of thing. I don’t know, it seems weird to think about, do you find that?
When I spoke to Greet Death a little while back, they believed that every band needs to have one “business guy” who knows how to work Excel.
They need that one guy and I don’t necessarily envy it. I never thought about music like this. After I made my first album on vinyl, to me, that was it. I wanted to have an album on vinyl, and I had no goals beyond that. Like, I was like, “This is it. I’ve done it. I put out a record.” But I didn’t realize that people [don’t always think that way]. Danny Goldberg wrote this book about being the manager of Nirvana, and when you grow up, you think, “This is the guy who didn’t like the attention, he just wrote these very simple songs.” And then you hear from the manager, this was the most cutthroat PR guy of all time and knew every journalist’s name and would not share songs with anybody. And you’re just like, “Oh, of course. That’s how you get to be those people.”
The legend of Kurt Cobain as an unwilling participant is a much better story.
I bought the story for a long time and I think that’s what surprised me so much about getting into music. I just thought that everybody would love it to where it was “music over everything,” but it’s like, “No, these people are trying to make a ton of money.”
Tough as it is in music itself, your old career path of music journalism is even more financially precarious.
Yeah, it’s such a bummer what’s happened to it. A lot of websites now have just gone to clickbait stuff and lists. I mean, there’s so much that I put into making this album and the details and things and then… oh man, like no nobody’s digging into this?
Are there people at shows who share with you how they’ve dug into the record?
It’s always nice to kind of hear that kind of stuff. I’m so in a box and I’m not very self-aware at all. I honestly have no idea how people see me. Maybe people just think I’m a super depressed guy, which I am. But with the people who come to the shows, I think that there’s an element to all the music that I make which comes from growing up with gospel. It’s acknowledging darkness and trying to move past the darkness. That’s what gospel music is generally about and that’s pretty much what I do. The people who come to my shows are generally going through a lot of stuff, but pretty hopeful and nice people. But I don’t know how they see me. I don’t think people associate me with everything that I write about. If I write “Rebecca” [a song from the perspective of a slave owned by Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman to serve in the US Senate] obviously this doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’ve never slow danced in a gay bar.
When you ask about what popular indie artists of today bring to the table, a lot of it is identification — like, you can assume everything that Lorde sings about really happened to her and thus you can reflect on whether that happened to you.
I’m not that interesting. If I want to keep making music, what am I just gonna write about? Hanging out with my kid?
But I’m told that “dad rock” is the wave in 2025.
Yeah, the dad rock record is when I would blow up [laughs].
Lower is out now via Fire Next Time. Find more information here.