Benee has always sounded a little bit like she’s beaming in from her own universe. “Supalonely” turned that universe into a global address, the kind of 2× Platinum, billions-of-streams breakthrough that can either define you forever or push you to blow everything up and start again.
On her sophomore album Ur An Angel I’m Just Particles, out now via Republic Records, she does something trickier. She zooms way out, stares down the weirdness of being alive in 2025, and still finds ways to make it all feel playful, sad, and yet strangely hopeful at the same time.
“I honestly think it’s just growing up and kind of waking up,” she said during a recent virtual press conference with 1824 and Juice Box Press. “Maybe it’s the frontal lobe developing when you hit 25, but I feel a lot wiser, or maybe I’m just asking much bigger questions, and everything is feeling a lot realer.”
That shift is all over Ur An Angel I’m Just Particles: the sound is more experimental, the lyrics more existential, and the emotions hit deeper. All without losing the off-kilter charm that made Benee stand out in the first place.
A mental breakdown in four chapters
If early Benee releases felt like journal entries from a chronic overthinker, this album feels like you’re dropped inside the full lifecycle of a spiral and the climb back out.
When she sat down to sequence the record, she didn’t just throw the tracklist together. “I wanted it to be a special narrative,” she explained. “I followed these honest chapters. Obsession, breakdown, chaos, ascent. That’s how I basically arranged the songs for the album.”
The record opens with “Demons,” sitting squarely in that “obsessive” phase, and closes with “Heaven”, a softer, more reflective track that lives in the ascent. Listening straight through, she says, “it does kind of feel like a mental breakdown, like the cycle of a mental breakdown.”
“Heaven,” in particular, became a turning point for her while writing. “It’s the first time I’ve written about losing someone,” she said. “Now I listen to it and it feels comforting, because obviously something everyone deals with in life is losing someone. It gave me this weird release… it was a deep sense of relief having that conclude the album.”
From New Zealand bubble to LA overload
A big part of that existential edge comes from Benee’s move from New Zealand to Los Angeles. It’s a jump that turned her life from relatively contained to relentlessly overstimulated.
“I think it’s impossible to not be affected by your environment when you’re making art,” she said. “Coming from New Zealand to LA… I was kind of living in a bit of a bubble. Here you’re just exposed to some crazy, crazy shit that you see on the daily.”
She didn’t sugarcoat her first impressions. “I’m extremely sensitive,” she admitted. “When I first got here, it was pretty rough. Seeing how f*cked up it is: the healthcare ads, the homelessness. I was like, what the f*ck is going on in this place?”
That sense of dissonance fuels some of the record’s most existential moments. Her song “Chain Mail” became a way of processing how much you’re expected to absorb, online and off.
She described it as a reaction to “the chaos of the world and the feeling like, now more than ever, you kind of have to just put up with so much as a human. What we digest online and what we see… we’re so desensitized and having to have this tough exterior, or like a thick skin.” It ties directly into the album’s recurring motif of sculptural armor, which appears across artwork, merch, and visuals. “We’ve been making these custom pieces of armor throughout the whole creation of the album,” she said, including a duct-tape suit on the back of the vinyl and CD.
Still, LA isn’t just a source of dread. On the flip side, she finds it energizing. “There’s so many different people, from all sorts of backgrounds, doing all sorts of things,” she said. “People I would have never met at home.” That tension, between horror and inspiration, isolation and community, is baked into the record’s DNA.
Soundtracking the spiral: strings, particles, and the power of live instruments
Ur An Angel I’m Just Particles is lyrically heavier, but it’s also musically richer too. The surreal, alt-pop palette is still there, but this time there’s more focus on live instrumentation and dynamic arrangements that let songs breathe, swell, and crack open.
One of the most shining examples is “Cinnamon,” a single where a cello line takes over and everything else drops away. “I love this part of the song,” she said. “There was a section that didn’t have the cello, and I knew I didn’t want to put another singing part in there. I wanted it to be an instrumental section.”
She called in her friend, a cellist whose melodic instincts she trusts completely. “I just sent him the song, he sent back the parts, and I think I probably cried for the first ten times listening to that section. Classical instruments like that kind of just evoke such deep and emotional feelings. They trigger a tearful response for me apparently.”
Making the album underscored how much she values that live, human element. “I kind of realized how important live music and instruments really is to creating music. Instruments have such a crazy way of tying to emotions,” she said. “I just love it. That’s my favorite part of the song.”
Finding her people in a room full of pop power players
For the first chapter of her career, Benee’s musical world largely revolved around one collaborator: New Zealand producer Josh Fountain, who helped shape everything from Fire on Mars to the “Supalonely” era. Moving to LA meant leaving that comfort zone and walking into rooms with some of pop’s heaviest hitters.
“When I first got here, I definitely had a strange kind of identity crisis,” she admitted. “I had been so used to working with just this one guy in New Zealand. I was so comfortable with him and I knew the kind of music I wanted to make. Then you come here and you’re thrown into sessions with the biggest pop producers and the biggest pop writers.”
That carousel was jarring at first. “It can feel like speed dating,” she said. “It can be really uncomfortable, and I don’t really like it, to be honest.” On an early LA trip, she spent one to two months in back-to-back sessions and walked away with only “Supalonely” and a track called “Blue” that felt honest enough to keep.
Over time, though, she found a crew that made sense. Ur An Angel I’m Just Particles reunites her with Fountain but also introduces new collaborators like Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd, who co-produced one of the album’s key tracks.
They also happen to be the only women behind the boards this time around, which isn’t lost on her. “It is bad how uncommon it is to have women producers in this industry,” she said. “Working with them was so special because there was just a deeper level of comfort and relatability. It was a really special collaboration with those girls.”
Elsewhere on the record, she taps PinkPantheress for a feature on “Princess,” a pairing that feels both unexpected and obvious in hindsight. “I had the song pretty much finished, but there was a section that I knew needed a feature,” Benee said. She’d been torn between a female rapper and PinkPantheress, whose “unique voice and really good lyrics and melodies” made her a dream pick. “I just sent it to her, and after a little while she sent back the vocals. She’s so talented. I feel lucky to have her on the album.”
Building a visual universe out of armor, clay, and DIY tours
Benee has always treated visuals as a core part of her storytelling, not an afterthought. She describes herself as a “visual learner” and points to her dyslexia as part of why images stick more than words.
“I always have a pretty strong idea of the visual world, even when it comes to starting a project,” she said. But for this album, that world didn’t fully snap into focus until after the songs existed. “I was writing a song about this, a song about that… just random shit,” she said with a laugh. Only later did she realize how much they connected through “emotional turmoil” and her move from
New Zealand to LA.
Once that clicked, the visuals followed in a rush. The sculptural armor motif, which shows up in everything from promo photos to the “Cinnamon” video, became a way to externalize the emotional armor she sings about on “Chain Mail” and elsewhere.
The “Cinnamon” video itself is a collage of tour-life spontaneity and carefully curated color. Made with her creative director Keith Hoban while on the road, it blends live footage, DIY setups, and stop-motion sequences.
“We were actually making it on tour,” she explained. “We were filming in each country wherever we could use the sculptural armor, the brown fold, the one which tied to the color of the song, or what I felt like the color of the song was.” In Copenhagen, she spotted a construction site with a pile of brown dirt and immediately knew she needed to shoot there. “It’s pretty fun,” she said. “It also just shows you don’t need all that fancy stuff. You kind of just need a camera and creative ideas and then someone good at editing.”
That mix of high concept and scrappy resourcefulness runs through everything she’s doing right now, from videos to styling. She describes herself as “a bit of a sponge,” soaking up inspiration from Harajuku street style, “funky old ladies” with huge glasses, and everything in between. “I’ve always been drawn to colors and patterns,” she said. “That whole genre of fashion is just so eclectic and colorful and unapologetic and unafraid to be out there.”
Hardcore guitars, and a title that pulls everything into orbit
One of the most intriguing threads in this new era is Benee’s growing fascination with heavier guitar music, sparked in part by her acting debut in the film Head South, where she had to step into a more grunge-leaning world.
“I didn’t really know an awful lot about that era,” she admitted. “I felt pretty nervous playing guitar and playing that kind of music. But it made me realize that sometimes at a real hardcore gig, people in the crowd, smashing their heads and shit, are having the best time, because that music is so intense and pulls such strong emotions out of you.” She laughed, then added, “I’m like, dang, I need to put some hardcore shit in my music.”
That itch might explain some of the album’s noisier, more distorted moments. Even when she’s still working in an alt-pop framework, you can feel her leaning toward rougher edges, messier emotions, and louder guitars.
All of it circles back to that title. Ur An Angel I’m Just Particles. It’s a phrase she pulled from an old demo that refused to leave her brain.
“I found myself always kind of saying that line,” she said. “When I wrote it, it felt really smart. When it came to coming up with the name for the album, I was struggling for a while, and then I thought back to it and it just made perfect sense.”
She breaks it down like this: “The ‘angel’ part ties to the ethereal world that I’ve been building, and this childlike wonder that I’ve been torn over the past few years, feeling overwhelmed with the world and the reality of everything. The ‘particles’ side makes me think of science and the existential vibe of how I’ve been feeling.”
Then she zoomed out even further. “How crazy is it that when you zoom into anything with a microscope, it’s just more particles? It’s so weird,” she said, laughing at the absurdity of the topic on a press call. “Talk about existential.”
The open book phase
Despite all the anxiety, apocalypse talk, and mental-breakdown narratives woven through Ur An Angel I’m Just Particles, Benee herself remains disarmingly light and funny. That balance between humor and heavy feelings might be the secret weapon of this whole era.
“One thing I always don’t think about is the songs coming out when I’m writing them,” she said. “There’s no filter, so I do usually end up writing about everything and don’t hold back. When it comes to putting it out, I’ve got this weird numbness to it. I’m just like, well, it is what it is. I’m an open book.”
The album’s release hasn’t been all confetti and champagne. She talked about waking up the week after it dropped feeling oddly low. “I feel so exposed,” she admitted. “I kind of got a weird wave of depression four days after releasing music. I’m like, is it gonna get lost in the sauce?” Judging by the way Ur An Angel I’m Just Particles sticks in your brain. The armor, the strings, the existential cracks and tiny, glittering jokes, that seems extremely unlikely.
Featured Photo Credit: Jorge Rico