Alec Benjamin
“I did all that so I wouldn’t have to do it again,” Alec Benjamin told Ramona in 2023 about the years he spent playing car parks outside other people’s shows, and “Let Me Down Slowly”, the song that ended them, is the one he strips right back on our roof, with “Devil Doesn’t Bargain” next to it.
He grew up in Phoenix and signed to Columbia while he was studying at USC, and the label dropped him weeks after he handed in his album. He paid his own way around Europe opening for Marina Kaye in France and Lea in Germany, and in between he stood in the car parks outside other artists’ gigs, handing out business cards to whoever came past.
The songs are stories sung in a high, plain tenor over acoustic guitar, which is what his 2018 mixtape promised in its title, Narrated for You. “Let Me Down Slowly” came out on it and went top 40 in more than 25 countries, and he’s put out three albums since, the latest 12 Notes in 2024, along with Mandarin versions of his own songs, including a “Water Fountain” duet with Zhao Lusi.
MORE MOODS
Ruel Australia
Sydney's RUEL joins us on Mood on the Roof, which this time just happens to be a floor down, for a secret YouTube Music Nights show in our warehouse, played in the round to a sweat-soaked crowd getting the new Kicking My Feet & Screaming songs at point-blank range.
Sports United States
Oklahoma’s Sports have spent the last decade making electronic/pop music that’s almost too slippery to categorise, pulling psych, funk, soft rock and electronics into something unmistakably their own. They hit the roof with two cuts from their new self-titled record, the nervy, glitch-heavy “Drama King” and the much warmer “Keep Falling in Love”.
Nick Mulvey United Kingdom
Nick Mulvey pulled up to the roof solo for two songs and twelve years between them, “Dark Harvest”, the title track off his fourth album, and “Fever to the Form”, his fan favourite dropped in 2014.
Jack Gray Australia
Jack Gray performs Winter City like a late check-in from the road, all cold-air pop hooks and touring fatigue, the sound of an Australian kid looking around a foreign skyline and turning the homesick feeling into something you can sing along to.