Liam Benzvi is sitting across the table from me in the backyard of a coffee shop in Brooklyn, and we’re fact-checking his Wikipedia page. “Well, they don’t make any sense,” the artist says of the list of influences that includes Cyndi Lauper, The B-52s, Siouxsie Sioux, The Cure, Blonde Redhead, Frou Frou, and Y2K-era Madonna. Citation needed? “I mean, all of these are true,” he admits. Citation achieved. “There’s so many people that I love and admire and look up to,” he tells me. “I guess it’s just music criticism that I fucking hate.” Then, wryly: “But, um, I love A.V. Club.”
The first thing you notice about Benzvi, whether listening to his album …And His Splash Band (out September 27 via Fat Possum Records), or in conversation, is his voice. He has the crisp baritone of someone who went to acting school but went into music instead; an instrument honed and then perverted by way of shoegaze sonics with a healthy dose of New York cynicism delivered with a knowing wink. “I love hating New York, because all the transplants love it,” he explains. “So I need to fucking hate it.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Benzvi attended the famous LaGuardia High School and spent a lot of his teenage years around live music. “I was dating a lot of musicians, and I was setting up gear for my boyfriends. But it was always, ‘Oh, he’s the actor. He’s not a part of this, but he’s going to help us out and hang out with us.’” He continued to study acting at the University Of Minnesota while composing songs on his laptop in his dorm room. By his senior year, he had formed a band. Benzvi released a solo EP in 2019 and his debut album, Acts Of Service, in 2022.
...And His Splash Band is still a solo album, but Benzvi has returned to the band as a concept. It started as an idea for album art, when Benzvi was inspired by 1970s European one-hit wonders. “Initially I didn’t necessarily even know if I wanted the band to play instruments. I kind of wanted to dig into my theater roots and create this facade of a band, like The Monkees or S Club 7,” he recalls. “The first rehearsal, I just grabbed my three cutest guy friends and was like, ‘Would you just mime the instruments?’” Fairly quickly, however, it became clear that it would just be easier to be an actual band than a fake one, even if the group did eventually invent some lore and characters within the Splash Band.
This concept is fully on display in the album’s lead single, “Dust.” The music video sees the Splash Band’s tyrannical agent berating them, trying to get a hit. It’s both part of the lore for the fictional band, but a real source of angst for the artist. “It’s fun to exaggerate and to stretch your fears into a completely different world,” he says. “But yeah, I'm in a stage in my life now where I want to, like, write for the pop girls really badly, and I feel like I deserve to.” He’s laughing, but he’s serious and has ideas: Sabrina Carpenter, Ethel Cain, and PinkPantheress are at the top of the list. “I feel like those three girls are doing the most with melody. And, like, Ariana Grande. If you’re a pop girl, hit me up.”
Listening to …And His Splash Band, it doesn’t sound all that far-fetched. Two of his pre-release singles, “Other Guys” and “PTLSD” feature two heavy-hitting artists—Dev Hynes (best known as Blood Orange) and Cody Critcheloe (SSION), respectively—that Benzvi met rather incidentally. Benzvi joined Hynes’ band when he opened for Harry Styles’ sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden last year, and was allowed to include one of his own tunes in the set. Styles’ famously devout fanbase would turn out night after night, and by the fourth show, there were fans in the crowd screaming specifically for Benzvi. “It felt kind of preposterous, just because, like, at the time, I was in between housing, too,” he recalls. “I was performing in front of, like, screaming teenagers my song at MSG, and then I was clocking out and being like, ‘Okay, see you tomorrow!’ And sleeping on my mom's couch.” Hynes, he says, gives himself the space to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. “That’s what I’ve always aspired to do, to afford myself the time to treat it like a job.”
His collaboration with SSION, on the other hand, grew out of a phrase that Critcheloe had coined and wanted to use in a song one day. Benzvi actually wrote the rest of the chorus and music, “then Covid happened,” so it was placed on the back burner for a while. It’s in the music video, though, that it becomes most clear that Benzvi found a kindred, theatrical spirit. Critcheloe came up with the idea to model the shoot on some Brazilian soap opera comics about jilted lovers in a suburban setting. Benzvi got the call one day to “get on a plane to Kansas City, like ASAP, and come here because I have a crew and I have all this stuff. We can make this video now, but you need to come now.”
The clip does feel pretty psychedelic, as its name would suggest, and is a lot of fun as the two guys frolic and flirt. “I've never seen two gay guy musicians singing a song together,” he says about the video, acknowledging that there were likely closeted musicians before him. “Not to make it about that, we should get some credit for that. It's not even like we're a couple in the video. I think we're just like two queens, fagging out basically.”
…And His Splash Band has a way of sneaking up on the listener; it’s a largely chilled-out body of work that almost subliminally feeds you earworms you don’t realize are earworms until it’s hours later and you still have “Toysick” stick in your head. That track, Benzvi says, is about a specific type of horniness that’s hard for him to articulate non-musically. (“It’s kind of being horny for, like, that brain-dead sensation of fucking.”) And while he’s careful to say that he does care about his lyrics, he admits they’re not where he starts when he’s writing. “I would much rather have something not make any sense, than have it make too much sense,” he says. “Double Homicidal Man,” likewise, stretches some language for the sake of its chorus. The result feels particularly reminiscent of some of the proto-boy bands that inspired the project, at least melodically; the production undoubtedly has some Blood Orange influence, with a beeping synth line that recalls Madonna’s “Mother And Father.”
“The art that I create, that I make for this record, I really want it to exist as this kind of aspirational rock star façade thing,” he says. But as we talk, it becomes clear that Benzvi’s hopes for the album are fairly pragmatic, and he knows it sounds corny. “Honestly, I hope that the record just allows me to tour and play it more, so that I can experience the love of music more, and I can do it with my boys.” As has been the case for the past hour, there’s a hint of irony in his voice as he finishes his thought. But, by now, I can tell that he means it.
