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3. BendreTheGiant
Sounds like: A former loner discovering the joy of community.
The more ground BendreTheGiant covers, the more assured they sound.
From the ambient hip-hop instrumentals compiled on 2021’s Bendrebeats Vol. 1 to the communal funk soul of last year’s Wading in the Deep End EP, no two of their releases sound the same. “Do You Feel It,” the first single from the band’s upcoming album, Swollen Eyes, introduces a whole new sound for the Portland combo: soft, voluptuous disco, paced at the tempo of the sultriest Italo singles, a strong argument that singer-songwriter Ben Estrada could lend his black-velvet baritone to dance tracks as a side gig.
Can we expect Swollen Eyes to be the band’s Confessions on a Dance Floor? Hardly; keyboardist Delos Erickson, Estrada’s primary co-writer in the band, cites the likes of Funkadelic, Jamiroquai and Morris Day and The Time as inspirations for the album’s direction.
“One reason why this new album is something we really look forward to is that it has such a breadth of genre,” Erickson says. “We’re super happy to play all different kinds of music. We grew up playing and listening to all different kinds of music, so we just want to share that.”
Swollen Eyes comes out June 12 on Tender Loving Empire, the powerhouse Portland label and boutique that’s put out releases by indie luminaries like Y La Bamba, Ural Thomas and the Pain, and Andy Shauf.
“The entire process moved very fast relative to a lot of other signings,” drummer Nate Hansen says. “It was a Wednesday that I went and introduced myself to [label founder] Jared [Mees]. We had some coffee the following Thursday. Not 24 hours later, Ben was in the Tender Loving Empire office.”
This is BendreTheGiant’s first full-length album of original material, coming on the heels of last year’s self-released Hollow Heads, which compiles the band’s first two EPs and single “Make It Stop” into an album-length statement. Though Estrada is still the primary singer-songwriter and Erickson the primary composer-arranger, producer Justin Yu and bassist Eli Hansen also contributed to the writing process on Swollen Eyes.
“Our last two EPs were older songs Ben had written before,” Erickson says. “On this album, I think there’s only one or two that were old demos. Everything else was specifically written for this album. It’s really cool that this is our first kind of full collaboration.”
The next single from Swollen Eyes, “Voice Inside My Head,” is out on April 24 as the band’s first official release through Tender Loving Empire.
“The song is written from the perspective of somebody that is addicted to their partner,” Estrada says. “They’re addicted to the love that somebody’s providing them, not necessarily in a healthy way. And it features a great flute solo from Ben Harris, our saxophonist and flutist. It’s sort of a mix between a ballad and Earth, Wind & Fire super funk—it gets really intense at the end.”
The band is already thinking about next steps and has recording sessions booked with producer Andy Park, who worked with art-metal titans Deftones on their 2020 album Ohms.
“In this music environment, the economy of attention, we’re already looking forward to the next project,” drummer Hansen says.
The BendreTheGiant project began as what the Gresham-born Estrada describes as an “outlet for my depression.” Many of the band’s songs were written during a period when Estrada had thrown his back out on the job while working as a caregiver, incapacitating him for weeks and leaving him with ample time to write and record.
“I think when I initially was writing music in 2021 and 2022, I was just using music as an escape from my life at the time,” Estrada says. “I didn’t necessarily have grandiose ideas for the music.”
When he and Erickson became roommates, they began fleshing out Estrada’s ideas together and built them into the four-song EP Get Well Soon!, which contrasts breezy yacht-rock arrangements with Estrada’s brooding vocal tones. As more musicians came aboard, what was once a solitary project became an expression of communal joy.
The music still tackled heavy themes, as on Wading in the Deep End standout “Homeless,” inspired by a time in Estrada’s life when he and his dad lived with the threat of homelessness hanging over their heads after the family home was foreclosed on. This time, though, the serious subject matter was offset by Estrada’s audible joy at bouncing his ideas around with the cadre of musicians surrounding him.
“Make It Stop,” one of the band’s best songs, features a dizzying moment when Estrada stops singing and starts monologuing about how lucky he is to have such a great crew with him. Moments later, Harris bursts in with a winding, serpentine sax solo, and the music achieves an ecstasy that leaves the lonesome and housebound vibe of the earliest BendreTheGiant demos in the dust.
“There are five other guys, sometimes eight other guys onstage with me,” Estrada says. “I have to think about what all of our collective goals are as a band, as a family. I know we all have big goals, big dreams. With this new album, we’re really putting our best foot forward.”
