Monday May 31st – 7:30pm to 11pm
‘Out Of My Mind’ is a welcome return from Brooke Bentham, pairing her always-intimate, candid but ultimately cathartic storytelling with a tougher, expansive sound (and one that’s no less raw). Produced by Bill Ryder-Jones (The Coral, Arctic Monkeys, Paul Weller), lyrically ‘Out Of My Mind’ – says Brooke – “is about what happens when you don’t communicate fully in a relationship. The lyrics are pretty tongue in cheek and I wanted it to sound as though it comes from a place of anger. I’m still in the relationship I wrote it about, so it’s just really funny to me now.”
Across two EPS – ‘This Rapture’, and ‘The Room Swayed’ – Brooke Bentham has crafted kitchen-sink dramas of exquisite detail, honesty, and quiet assurance. Here is a young artist barely out of school whose voice nonetheless carries the weight of someone who has already lived a hundred lives already. Brooke was in fact born and raised – in large, part, fending for herself with three older brothers – in Southshields, before relocating to New Cross to study at Goldsmith’s. Then, she began to feel part of a wider arts community, forming her live band and finding a mutual sense of camaraderie among a new generation of South London creatives. Now focused on the harsh realities facing any young graduate – or in this case, the daunting job of writing a debut album – Brooke Bentham’s early sound swells and plummets in ways which feel as inspired by the alt-rock journeying of Ryan Adams as the emotive vocal depths of Sharon Van Etten or Angel Olsen.