What happens when a precocious youth becomes just another adult? As a college student in London, Brooke Bentham’s early singles attracted buzz and earned her a deal with British indie label AllPoints. But when it came time to write a debut album post-graduation, she was burned out: “I was just lying in bed every day and just watching television,” she told NME. “I couldn’t write and I felt like a piece of shit.” She worked two retail jobs to make ends meet, drawing on the non-musical experience for lyrical inspiration. The eventual album, Everyday Nothing, is not exactly about finding beauty in the mundane; while the music is frequently beautiful, it doesn’t glorify stasis. If it celebrates anything, it’s self-sufficiency—fitting for an artist who, after spending her formative years settling on a sound, has found her niche.
To achieve this, Bentham trades art-pop producer Ben Baptie for singer-songwriter Bill-Ryder Jones. The production on Bentham’s early EPs often drowned her voice in psychedelic effects or heavy synths that didn’t necessarily complement her music, except to mirror the intoxication of her narrators on songs like “I Need Your Body.” Many lyrics on the new record are about not being intoxicated: “All my friends are drunk/I haven’t been wasted in months,” for example, or, “I don’t smoke, ’cause I dont wanna die anymore.” Ryder-Jones’ production reflects this newfound lucidity. Though there are experimental touches, like the drum machines and e-bow of opener “With Love,” Bentham’s voice is at the center. The tasteful restraint can be weirdly thrilling: “Telling Lies” combines the intimacy of a rehearsal session with what sounds like a My Bloody Valentine song playing in the background while Bentham was recording. Other reference points include ’90s indie rock staples Yo La Tengo and Sparklehorse; younger listeners might picture Phoebe Bridgers fronting Alvvays.
If the music has obvious ancestry, Bentham’s lyrics can be harder to trace. “Blue Light” concerns itself with keeping love alive, though a line like, “You brush your teeth more than me/I feel so ashamed” suggests a deeper, self-conscious kind of fear. On “Men I Don’t Know” and “Keep It Near,” Bentham reveals exhaustion at the idea of being a full-time musician, asking why she’s “burdended herself” doing what she loves when the rewards are few and far between. When she does get sentimental, she’s restrained, as on the unexpected late-album love song “Without,” which recalls the Jo March monologue from Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation: Like Jo, Bentham asserts her love and independence while simultaneously admitting that she’s unhappy.
Because the album’s scale and ambitions are modest, some of its songs blend together. It’s easy to mentally segue from the verses of “All My Friends Are Drunk” to the chorus of “Blue Light,” or to conflate mid-tempo advance singles “Perform for You” and “Control.” Still, the individual songs are strong enough that obsessing over their similarity feels like nitpicking. It was never Bentham’s intention to laugh defiantly in the face of malaise, or to talk about her coming-of-age journey as an unqualified triumph. All she meant to do was find reasons to keep writing.
