Typically, the sophomore album comes as a matured version of the sound seen on a debut album. Looking at San Diego artist Cheyenne Benton, and her newest pop-rock LP, Corrupted, her evolution seems much like a direct result of age and more of an emotional U-turn. While the first record, Beautiful Chaos, felt like a standard California pop debut, Corrupted took Benton’s lyricism in a sharper, and more emotionally charged direction that the artist claims was less of a directed genre-shift and more an attempt to live and write truthfully to her own environment – “The abrupt shift from Beautiful Chaos to Corrupted wasn’t so much planned as it was just how I was feeling when I wrote that record at the time. So a lot of the darker sound came from that, whereas, Beautiful Chaos, I was feeling a lot lighter in my personal day to day life, and I handled conflict in a different way, and I had kind of a different outlook on life.”
Her hometown of San Diego also affected her sound, in a roundabout way. According to Benton, the city is home to a number of bands in the surf and indie rock scene, a scene she feels is primarily dominated by straight white men. While she mentioned that the DIY garage-rock sound of the area can definitely serve as an inspiration, she said the influence of the local scene was “in more rebellious ways than in a competitive way.”
It’s rare for the evolution of an artist’s sound to so perfectly mirror their emotional journey the way it has for Benton, whose newest LP is centered around ideas of feminine rage, the rejection of traditional womanhood, and the struggles of deconstructing previous identities – themes which were clearly grounded in reality as she fought to bring the piece to life in a scene dominated by dads and dad rock.
Benton likened the processing of these emotions to being at war, speaking of the turmoil she experienced processing ideas like “What I believe to be like, what is a woman’s role? What does it mean to be a good woman? Experiencing this anger and this rage? Is this right?”
These experiences, she clarified, were not only those of women, and undoubtedly not only a white experience, but the struggles of anyone rejecting a Christian and conservative upbringing. Coming to terms with these questions is a catalyst of a new era of life, in Benton’s eyes, an era in which she felt the weight of disillusionment. The strong emotion in her mind, and the one which seemingly inspired the title of her newest work, was “this feeling of not only being betrayed by someone who’s close to you, but kind of being betrayed by yourself. Like, how could I let another person treat me this way?”
It’s this dark, complex feeling that led Benton back towards the studio. “I try to turn to music, because it gives me more tools to articulate…I can paint the picture visually. I can create a sonic scape that supports those feelings.”
Any one with more than a megabytes worth of listening history can pinpoint songs which attempt to capture the author’s feeling in a sound rather than a lyric. It’s rare for an artist in the pop scene to embrace that writing style as directly as Benton does though, and it’s put to its greatest effect on “Strangers” and title track “Corrupted”. It’s here where Benton leans the most distinctly into this album’s sound, and most clearly allows the album to become what Benton hoped
Hi! My name is Jake Bennett, I'm a film and computer science student at UA. I'm also a member of WVUA's speciality show Loser Radio, an avid fan of indie rock, and a social media manager for artists!
