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INTERVIEW: Welcome to ‘The Program,’ courtesy of Brkn Love

Photo: Brkn Love’s new album is called The Program. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by Freeman Promotions with permission.


Brkn Love, a quickly rising band on the rock scene, recently released its third album, The Program, out now from Spinefarm Records. At the center of the group is singer-songwriter-guitarist Justin Benlolo, a Canadian artist whose early influences include Led Zeppelin and Soundgarden.

“It’s always interesting when I put out music because it’s a fine balance,” Benlolo said in a recent phone interview. “OK, the pressure or the anxiety of releasing it is now over because it’s out in the world, but also there’s all these new fears that pop up. Are people going to like it? Is the album going to do well? I always have to try to remind myself to enjoy the day and not freak out about the future. There were already enough hurdles to get to this point, so I do find myself glued to social media basically all day any time we release anything just to see what people are saying. It’s like anything else. You reach the achievement, and then you get it. Well, what’s next?”

The Program, featuring such songs as “2020 Vision,” “Shiver” and “Pulling Leeches,” was actually finished more than a year ago, but the band had to sit on the recording for a long time. The release took so many months that Benlolo is already thinking about the next recording.

“There were so many factors as to why it took so long, and it kept getting pushed back,” he said. “By this point, I’m already ready for the next record. I’ve had it for so long, and I’ve lived with these songs so long, it’s not new to me obviously. But it’s not uncommon for this to happen. Plenty of records sit for a while, and they have to fit into a release schedule. Obviously there are a lot of factors that work outside of just the band that are at play.”

Whatever the formula might be, it seems to be working because Brkn Love keeps finding success. The group — also consisting of Kyle Duke on guitar, Nick Katz on bass and Russell Holzman on drums — has generated more than a quarter-of-a-billion total streams, according to press notes. On previous albums, “they notched a Top 15 entry on Active Rock radio with ‘Shot Down,’ while their cover of ‘River’ by Bishop Briggs hit critical mass. It inspired over 2 billion-plus views on TikTok,” according to a news release. A previous song, “Like a Drug,” has more than 8 million Spotify streams and took over Canadian radio.

The rock world seems ready to embrace The Program, which was largely written while Benlolo was visiting Charleston, South Carolina, and it was ultimately recorded in Los Angeles. One song, “2020 Vision,” was actually cowritten with Queens of the Stone Age’s Michael Shuman.

Interestingly, Brkn Love didn’t test these new songs out on the road before they recorded them in the studio. Benlolo and company only bring the tunes to the live crowds once they’ve laid down the track during the recording process. That’s how it worked for their 2020 self-titled debut and 2022’s Black Box.

“We’ve never road-tested anything, just because the way that I like to write is I utilize all the modern programming and stuff,” Benlolo said. “I make all the demos on my computer. … We’ve never actually written a song in a room together, playing and working things out. It’s always been me at a computer kind of hashing things out with myself. We’ve only tested songs out after they were recorded. … We’ve been playing ‘2020 Vision’ for a while. We’ve been playing ‘Pulling Leeches’ for a while. We’ve got some pretty great responses from it. I’m pretty sure the reason why the label went with ‘Pulling Leeches’ as the lead single is because we were getting such a great response from it live, but we’ve never actually road-tested anything before we’ve recorded it.”

Playing “Pulling Leeches” live was actually a fluke, Benlolo said. He was in Los Angeles recording the album, and then he decided to head home to Toronto. At that point, he played the song for one of the band’s crew members who come out on tour with Brkn Love.

“And out of all of them, he was like, ‘Oh, dude, this song, ‘Pulling Leeches,’ is the one that’s going to hit live,'” he said. “I’m like, ‘Really? You think so?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, you should definitely try it out.’ So we ended up learning it to play live because also at the time we were still working the previous album cycle, so we didn’t want to just keep swapping out the songs that we were currently promoting for new ones. We were just willing to try one, and it seemed like every single night we played it, people were really bouncing to the chorus. It has sort of a bouncy feel. It’s kind of a stabby riff, and it feels like something people could jump up and down to. People kept asking us about the song every single night, and then I would get messages on social media: ‘When is ‘Pulling Leeches’ coming out?’ And I just kept relaying that information to the label, and I think they decided to take their opinions into account.”

For the actual song, Benlolo was attempting to capture a White Stripes or Jack White vibe, especially with the lyrics. “I kept trying to get into the world of his language,” he said. “Jack White is really quirky and weird, and he’ll throw out some really odd phrases.”

That’s why the song features lyrics that are a little “odd,” like heading to a mountain in Machu Picchu. Benlolo was after something that was funny and quirky. “We kind of went full White Stripes on that song honestly,” the guitarist said. “Even when we recorded it, it was done in one take. We didn’t do any edits. It’s super raw and pretty much untouched as far as the mix went. I remember Anton DeLost, our producer, while we were recording, he’s like, ‘Dude, you better believe I am not mixing this at all.’ It was pretty cool.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Brkn Love’s new album is called The Program, and it’s out now on Spinefarm Records. Click here for more information.

John Soltes

John Soltes is an award-winning journalist. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Earth Island Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, New Jersey Monthly and at Time.com, among other publications. E-mail him at john@hollywoodsoapbox.com

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