If our digital lives in 2021 is a kind of party, chances are we’d be pulling an Irish goodbye and getting the fuck out of here. But we really have no place else to go, no sanctuary to embrace; so while we’re stuck here with ceilings over our heads and faces glued to the glowing screens that own us — small screen for social (phone), medium screen for work (laptop), big screen for entertainment (television) — Benin City have a dance track in “Freaking You Out” fit for the “doomscrolling disco” that seemingly never ends.
The London trio of Joshua Idehen, Tom Leaper, and Shanaz Dorsett dropped the lively house number on Wednesday (January 27), following up two standalone 2020 singles in “Mess Like Me” and “Get Your Own.” When Dorsett sings about wanting to call an Uber and get out of this entire mess, well, we’re really feeling it.
“I wrote it as a soundtrack to doomscrolling — a ‘doomscrolling disco’, if you will,” says Idehen. “Staring at Twitter, constantly refreshing the screen for the next bit of bad news to blanket over me. Worldwide it’s felt like an even more relentless wave of bad news — especially since 2016 — and hella hard to look away or tune out. My verse is a wish that I could.”
Adds Dorsett: “It’s a perfect collision between the type of sounds that we once boogied to together, and the anxious sentiments that we all share at the moment. We have ranted in the group chat and comforted each other via Zoom a lot over the last year, and this song is like our collective ‘Oh my god! It’s all just a little too much!’ — as the lyrics go.”
Stop the scrolling and dance a little, wherever you may be at the moment.