BENEE: LYCHEE | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- The latest release from NZ artist BENEE, titled Lychee, showcases a number of different genre and style changes within the seven songs on offer. It opens with Beach Boy, a psychedelic, syncopated guitar riff, creating a dreamlike atmosphere and then is accompanied by a four-to-the-floor drum beat and BENEE’s iconic vocals. It's a very chilled, laid-back song with a super groovy/get down chorus and a great opener for the EP.

After that Lychee changes mood and direction, taking on a more melancholic atmosphere with Soft Side. It's a concise track with great production comprising a club disco beat with auto-tuned vocals. Hurt You, Gus is a pop song dedicated to “Gus”, someone near and dear to BENEE clearly, because the last thing she wants to do is hurt him. It's more of that moodiness the EP is channelling, with a dry drums and bass sound playing a staccato beat in unison. The chorus melody has a call and response between BENEE’s vocals and the open string, dreamy guitar.

Next is Never Ending, consisting of an out of tune, trippy guitar, trap beat, pedalled bass notes and autotuned vocals. The curveball comes at the three minute mark, where BENEE’s vocals introduce electric guitar and heavy, stadium style drums for a big impact on the last chorus of the song.

The sharp mood chicanes keep coming with Marry Myself, an up tempo number with a drum and bass beat and acoustic guitar. It’s uplifting, working on inner growth and focussed on loving one's self before making a commitment to anyone else. Then you can take a left turn into the starkly contrasting atmosphere and vibe of Doesn’t Matter. Much slower in tempo, the melody resembles a lullaby and the rest of the instrumentation supports this. Washed out drums, bass in the foreground and strummed guitar underneath everything in the mix, creating a dreamlike atmosphere. It harks back to some elements heard earlier in the EP, like Beach Boy, which contained similarly dreamlike elements.

BENEE ends Lychee on a high with Make You Sick, a festival banger for sure, with trap, heavy bass drones, build ups and drops. A chorus of BENEE proclaiming “I’m a bad bitch”, adds a little saltiness to the final bite of Lychee. To stretch the analogy a little further – there are a whole bunch of different flavours to Lychee: with this record BENEE proves herself to be highly entertaining and effortlessly in control whatever directions she chooses to go in, even when her fans have no idea where that's going to be.

- Sebastien Hetzel.