In a new chat with Pablo of the Minneapolis, Minnesota radio station 93X, Breaking Benjamin singer Benjamin Burnley explained why it’s hard to please every fan with new music.
“Well, we’ll push any boundary within the right means,” the frontman said of 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 continued his words, “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,” Burnley revealed. “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.”
The vocalist 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 mentioned their new single ‘Awaken.’
In a May 2023 interview, Jasen Rauch said the band had been working on a new album for over a year. In July 2023, Keith Wallen confirmed they were creating new music and expected to release it within a year.
On October 15, 2024, Breaking Benjamin announced they signed with BMG as their new record label. The next day, they released ‘Awaken,’ the first single from their upcoming seventh album. It will be a follow-up to 2018’s ‘Ember.’