Benjamin Booker
The Magic Bag
22920 Woodward Ave, Ferndale, MI 48220
February 19
It’s rare that an album can drop so early in the year and already boast that confident sound of something that’s going to hang on as one of the best of 2025.
That’s Benjamin Booker’s “LOWER,” which will be ranked by lists all over the web as one of the best albums of the year -- if we have to rank them that way. It’s not like it will expire like milk and go rotten by 2026.
His recent show at the Magic Bag in Ferndale was a bright spot – like his album, one of the most anticipated concerts of the year for me (and I’m picky as hell about live music). But don’t get it twisted. It’s a dark record on all levels – thematically, sonically, lyrically. Sounds about right for these times. It’s a progressive record, too. It’s music that sounds ahead of the curve.
In a musical era where some songs can feel as smooth as a bean, every inch of “LOWER” is smothered in texture and atmosphere. You can hear the room it was recorded in; you can hear what Booker was communicating. It feels like I’m cruising in the passenger seat while Booker gives me a tour of New Orleans, where he lives, or the woodsy trailer parker outside of Tampa, where he grew up and discovered punk rock.
People like Pompeii statues lying out on the street
Even the children begging, everyone in the heat
As we drive, it becomes more surreal and truly seen through the eyes of the artist.
We see a woman screaming, spirits above her head
A guitarrón is playing a ballad for the dead
Booker started as a buzzed-about, fuzzed-out guitarist and singer weaving punk and blues together with a raspy, gospel-drenched voice.
On “LOWER,” his first album in seven years on his own label FIRE NEXT RECORDS, he’s evolved mightily. Big guitars have stayed. He’s got that raspy Sunday school delivery still (I adore it). But now, he’s enlisted underground hip-hop producer Kenny Segal to bring it all together. Segal came to my attention from his work with Billy Woods. On Booker’s album, Segal is bringing sonic flourishes, bleeps and boops, driving programmed beats, fragments of piano and other delicious worlds of sound that completely set it apart from anything Booker has done.
There’s plenty of examples of hip-hop, punk and rock meeting over the decades, but the lo-fi, off-kilter sensibility to this collaboration, IDLES’s recent “TANGK” album (produced, in part, by hip-hop producer Kenny Beats) and Danny Brown’s “Atrocity Exhibition” album (Detroit’s own Brown has never been shy about plucking samples from the deepest, dustiest crates of psychedelic-rock) stand out as a new class of blending these genres.
On stage at the Magic Bag, Booker brought a lot of these elements to life alongside a live drummer and Segal himself, adding the programming I loved from the record to the stage.
Did it always mix just right? Not quite. Booker kept his voice quiet enough that the monitors hissed back in disagreement at one point; the mic cranked up to grab that rasp in action. And Segal’s programming felt a little low or too high in the mix at times.
But when the band congealed after a handful of songs and hit a higher decibel, things clicked perfectly.
And in a small venue on a weekday -- one of the few not bought out by a major industry player -- I was extremely grateful that Booker found an audience for his beautiful record, and that the Magic Bag -- one of the most underrated venues in town -- could play host to it.
While the show didn’t stick to my ribs as much as I wished it would’ve, Benjamin Booker’s “LOWER” is an album that will live on well past 2025 as the best work this young artist has put out yet.
