Benjamin Booker is back with another new song, “Same Kind of Lonely,” from his forthcoming first album in seven years, Lower, out early next year.
“Same Kind of Lonely” is balanced deftly between the serene and the unsettling, with fuzz-bomb guitars rushing beneath the tender hush of Booker’s voice. Then the song’s bridge is abruptly interrupted by a burst of gunfire and screaming, which Booker recently told Rolling Stone, he sampled from video of a school shooting.
Booker said he included the audio because those random moments of horror “happen in our lives, just out of nowhere.” He then follows this striking moment with audio of his daughter laughing.
In a new statement, Booker explained how “Same Kind of Lonely” came about: “I was thinking a lot about existence and the natural world — how things that start off so beautiful are often twisted into something unsettling or sinister. Maybe the disconnect between the natural state of things and the modified state of things is the source of a lot of pain, suffering, and loneliness in the world.”
The track’s music video, which Booker co-directed with Gerry Cisneros, explores that tension with long shots of the natural world paired with footage of a dead body being dragged through a gorgeous landscape. Booker said he and Cisneros were interested in looking at “our twisting and distortion of ourselves and the world,” which is what led them to shots like algae on a lake transforming into digital needles, or “having eyes appear in trees.”
Booker continued: “We wanted to take nature and find ways to manipulate it. We were inspired by Haitian Vodou ceremonies, the paintings of Paul Gauguin, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, and Andrei Tarkovsky.”
“Same Kind of Lonely” marks the second offering from Lower, following “Lwa in the Trailer Park,” which arrived back in October. Lower is Booker’s third album and first since his celebrated 2017 effort, Witness. He co-produced the record with Kenny Segal, the hip-hop producer best known for his work with artists like Billy Woods and Armand Hammer.
Lower drops Jan. 24 and Booker will embark on a North American tour in support of the album in February. Segal will join him as both an opener, and a member of his live band.