God, I hope you’ve gone to sleep by the time that I get home
You don’t want to gaze upon
The monster I’ve become
If only you could love me for the demon that I am
By the time the drums crack open Lover, it’s already clear that Eddy Benz has ditched playing the wild card…he’s laying down something slower, meaner, and laced with a kind of quiet desperation that creeps in like heat off cracked pavement.
Benz has earned a reputation around New Orleans as a chaotic live presence: disrespectful in the best rock ‘n’ roll way, smashing through shows like he’s late for a bar fight. But Lover is a different kind of confession. Studio Benz is smoother, like he’s traded Jack Daniels for Pinot Noir but kept the hangover. The guitars jangle with the rhythm of a long-forgotten night at CBGB in the late 70s. The bass runs cold, like it studied under the tutelage of Peter Hook and lived to tell about it.
The lyrics? Brutal. Not in volume (though they cut) but in the way they draw a chalk outline around the kind of heartbreak that comes from within. Lover is about hating yourself just enough to ruin anything good; when drinking becomes ritual, when validation is borrowed and returned with interest. You can practically smell the stench of the bar floor.
There’s a brain behind the bruises, too. Benz threads in bigger ideas: panopticism, greed, freedom as performance art, but doesn’t linger. He slips them into verses like contraband, choosing mood over manifesto. It’s solipsism set to snare and reverb, a people-pleaser trying to wriggle out of his own skin without anyone noticing.
The video, directed by Shotbymattx, doesn’t explain the song so much as echo it. It’s a fever dream built from scraps: performance cuts melt into dreamlike drift, like channel-surfing through someone else’s breakdown. There’s no through-line, but you don’t need one. The images hit like flashbacks—uninvited, unfiltered, unforgettable.
Benz might’ve started out yelling at the ceiling fans in New Orleans bars, but on Lover, he’s whispering straight into your bloodstream. It’s not redemption. It’s not rebellion. It’s something far messier -truth, maybe? Or at least a version of it that’ll still sound good when the bottle runs dry.
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