In a recent chat with Loudwire Nights’ Chuck Armstrong, Ben Burnley explained why he won’t be involved in future decisions for Breaking Benjamin.
“I’m getting old. I’m kind of that guy where I am just here and they’ll tell me when they need me,” the frontman said of why he’s not worried about the band’s plans for 2025.
Breaking Benjamin recently released a new song named ‘Awaken.’ Burnley explained to Pablo of the Minneapolis, Minnesota radio station 93X why it’s difficult to satisfy all fans with new music.
“Well, we’ll push any boundary within the right means,” the singer talked about the level of experimentation in the band’s songwriting process. “You have two different kinds of listeners — you have people that will complain because you sound the same, and then you’ll have people that love you because you sound the same.”
He went on, “There’s no way to have both. There’s no way, ’cause if you sound the same, you’re not gonna cater to the people that want you to sound different. If you sound different, you’re not gonna cater to the ones that [want you to sound the same].”
“So we don’t necessarily purposefully go one of those ways or the other. We just write the way that we write,” Ben noted. “I have a sound that that’s just the way I sound. It’s like asking a seagull to sound like a crow. So that might have a thing to some people that we don’t change our sound, but to us on the inside, we certainly do.”
Burnley added, “I mean, we are always using new amps, new strings, new guitars, new methods. We’re always doing that kind of stuff. ‘Awaken,’ for example, does follow a certain structure, but not all the songs on that album are going to.”
“And not all the songs on the album are not going to. So on the album, there’ll be a little bit of literally everything, like a lot of different time signatures, a lot of different arrangements, and stuff like that. And ‘Awaken’ is just one of those songs,” Benjamin concluded.
The band dropped ‘Awaken’ on October 16, 2024. The release date for their new album isn’t known yet. They also don’t have any upcoming tour plans yet.