Melbourne/Naarm’s Bench Press are excited to announce the release of their third LP, Personal Best – their first new album in more than five years – out Friday 30 August via their long-term musical home, Poison City Records, along with sharing the second album cut, the angular single ‘Filter’. Pre-order the new album via Poison City's e-store here.
The third album from Bench Press – the band that arrived in 2016 bringing with them an essential dose of oddball, new-wave garage punk, who went on to share stages with IDLES and influenced the slew of proceeding bands that helped shape Melbourne's idiosyncratic punk sound – has been a long time coming.
After a global pause, an international exchange and a regrouping that welcomed two new members, Anna Lienhop (Moody Beaches) and Paolo Junior on drums, Bench Press re-emerged after their extended break with a catchier, rhythmic, and more textured sound, with Anna’s additional guitarwork facilitating the band’s multi-layered approach and contributing to the group vocals that heighten lead vocalist Jack Stavrakis’ absurd lyricism.
New single ‘Filter’ continues down this path. It’s a quick thrill of dynamic, pulsating rhythms cut with shard-like guitars and anguished vocals lamenting the fact that the quiet part is always said far too loud.
“‘Filter’ is about having no filter and telling everybody, everything, all the time. It's the constant reminder that I'm the loudest person in the room," Jack offers.
"But really, ‘Filter’ is about the stomach-churning interaction between being the loudest person in the room, having no filter, loudly spewing forth every dumb thought that comes into my head, regretting it later and then, and only then, forcing myself into silence”.
Personal Best, the band’s third long player, continues to meditate on themes of self and mental health lyrically but through a new lens, as the album follows Stavrakis’ journey of making a career change into mental health social work.
Where Stavrakis has previously dwelled on the politics of personal action, he now looks outwards and critiques what and who he sees in our increasingly chaotic world.