Miss Benny’s Burning Up For Your Love on Her Debut EP ‘Swelter’
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By design and definition, Miss Benny is the ultimate multi-hyphenate artiste. She writes, produces and distributes all her music, and the list doesn’t end there. LA’s rising starlet du jour, Miss Benny began her extensive career as a teen in the twenty-tens during the heyday of YouTube stardom, amassing a large following with early musical outputs, before landing roles in hit TV shows such as American Horror Story, Fuller House, and Love, Victor.
Flash forward to the summer of 2023, when top billing in Netflix’s Glamorous as Marco Mejia, assistant to the iconic Kim Cattrall, is met with lauded reception aplenty. Coinciding with this? The June release of her debut EP Swelter, and much like the title it’s the hottest of offerings.
A fiery fusion of rage and romance, Swelter presents a sultry, sophisticated landscape of tales loved and lost perfect for any holiday sunbed session. Over a thirty minute zoom call, Miss Benny and I cool off and descend the behind-the-scenes depths of all-things Swelter.
Swelter’s outstanding romantic storytelling is primarily driven by somber feelings of resentment, discontent, and sentimental longing. Is the EP an accurate representation of your own personal queer coming-of age experiences?
Yeah, I definitely feel so. I feel like a lot of queer people fall into this category where we, at least those of us who grew up in maybe conservative environments, weren’t allowed to be openly queer. We didn’t really get this playground to practice dating and expressing emotions when we were teenagers and kids, so you’re thrown into adulthood with no guidebook and no idea what to look out for and stay away from. I know that when I first started entering the dating world and expressing my sexuality I landed in situations that I ultimately was hurt from, and so enough of those experiences built up inside me and I didn’t know how to talk about them.
When the pandemic happened, I was left alone to my own thoughts and I realised how much unprocessed anger and resentment I had. I think a lot of that stemmed from the fact that I’d never been taught to navigate my emotions, my heartbreak and my feelings. That’s a pretty unique or relatable experience to queer people, and so with Swelter I wanted to give people, first of all, an insight into my personal life for the first time.
Up to this point I’d been sort of just a light-hearted, silly party girl and I wanted to show what happens after the party [laughs]. I wanted to give people music to just be angry to.
The sonic departure on Swelter from previous dance and synth pop-heavy releases like “That’s My Man” and “Every Boy” is pretty significant; you play with a plethora of new sounds and stylings. I hear strong 80s hard rock and heavy metal influences in the lead single ‘Break Away,’ meanwhile the closer ‘Rush To You’ evokes the melancholic magic of early 2000s pop punk ballads. What factors informed this evolution of sorts?
I grew up listening to Paramore and Coheed And Cambria, and then to see artists like Rina Sawayama pull in so many elements that include rock and metal, it inspired me to do it myself. I put out Swelter in June and I wanted that to be a cathartic introduction to who I am as a person. Before I’d been pretty surface level with my music, and I loved that, but I wanted to do something that felt a little more of an introduction to the real me.
Are there any other music genres you’d be willing to dip your toes in?
The indie sleaze revival and artists like The Dare are inspiring me! I’ve been pulling a lot of references for that in my own music. I’m trying to find other artists and producers to collaborate with who also feel that indie revival coming.
“In a lot of those early songs I was writing about myself and my identity in a very personal way that I didn’t really realise at the time. Now as a transgender woman and as a music artist writing about my experience as a queer person, it’s kind of funny to look back and see that I always knew myself.”
The LA heat is a big motif throughout Swelter. It’s featured in both lyrics and visuals, particularly in ‘My Ex Just Fell In Love’. You navigate the streets of LA for its visualiser, and towards the end of the song itself the radio announces, ‘Hope you aren’t too heartbroken […] Try to stay cool in the sweltering heat’, which I just adore. How did you come up with such an interesting, introspective metaphor?
I basically wrote Swelter and came up with the creative concept behind the whole EP, particularly My Ex Just Fell In Love, from a mind-body connection I was having at the time. When I was left alone in the pandemic to process my anger and my feelings, I found that my rage manifests in body heat and temperature. When I get really anxious or when I start to have a panic attack, my whole body starts to get very hot, no matter how cold the room I’m in is. And so I felt like the word ‘swelter’ to me and, maybe the dictionary I don’t know [laughs], was about this state of discomfort in heat. I wanted to sort of carry that through all of the songs and My Ex Just Fell In Love felt like kind of a thesis for the EP.
On the song I talk about processing seeing somebody that hurt you be happy with somebody else, and realising that they get to move on in their life, and you’re still processing that anger. To me that manifests in heat and sweating and rage. I had a dear friend of mine, Thomas Sanders, do the voiceover bit in the beginning and the end. I was living in Los Feliz at the time and I wanted to tie so many aspects of my life together: My YouTube past by having Thomas on the song, and where I was living at the time because it really just timestamped it for me.
You’re quite the active TikTok user, a lot of your videos dive into the backgrounds behind some of your earliest releases. Do you still treasure those songs from your youth?
I think of them the same way that people think about home movies they made when they were kids, or fun plays that you did with your friends in high school. Although, I do hear them and I have many feelings and thoughts on the execution of these ideas [laughs].
Little Game was the first song I ever put out, when I was 14. That song’s not even mixed or mastered, I literally just put it out. I’m still very proud of the track because of how pure in intention it was, and it ultimately allowed me to do what I do now. That song ended up completely changing my life.
The internet really latched onto it and really showed up for me, and that was confirmation that music was always going to be a tool I could use to express myself and feel validated in what I had to say.
I think in a lot of those early songs I was writing about myself and my identity in a very personal way that I didn’t really realise at the time. Now as a transgender woman and as a music artist writing about my experience as a queer person, it’s kind of funny to look back and see that I always knew myself. I just needed to catch up to myself.
From day one you’ve pushed the envelope as a queer entertainer, defying gender constructs through the meshing of masculine and feminine energies in music videos such as “Rendezvous”. In a Time Magazine feature, published in June, you wrote candidly about your transition for the first time. What has the general response been like since coming out to the public?
The response to my transition has been so incredible. I didn’t know how my body would feel, I didn’t know how I would feel about the fact that it was suddenly not a secret that I was holding close to my chest anymore. It felt like a huge relief, physically and mentally.
People who either were also on a journey of transition, or were just so supportive of the journey that I’m on right now, I got a lot of parents and adults who know trans kids or young trans people in their lives. It was heartwarming to see that they found and identified with me, and the adults around them supported them because of people like me. I think that’s really telling about how representation is important.
I’m just super relieved and excited to be out as the person I’ve been living as for the last couple of years.
What’s next in the pipeline for Miss Benny? You recently spoke about not having done a live show yet, has this taken place since?
I definitely want to do my first show and I want it to be a really big moment. Swelter was an amazing foundation for me to build and now work off of. I'm finishing my first full-length project right now. I have the title of the project, I have all the songs mapped out. I’m super excited about it.
You know, as an independent artist it’s been really fun to have so much creative freedom and ability to execute my own vision, but I’m also really excited at the prospect of finding wider distribution. I have dreams of being a big ole pop star and I’m very excited to see what we can reach next.
Words: Douglas Jardim | Photography: Savanna Ruedy | Styling: Marc Eram | Makeup: Rob Scheppy | Hair: Dita Vushaj | Clothing: Versace
Swelter by Miss Benny is out NOW.