“Why should you feel better? Why should anyone feel fucking better, man?”
Dave Le’aupepe is answering a question about Gang of Youths‘ new single, “Benny’s Video”, and he isn’t particularly interested in providing the comforting resolution I suggest listeners might be missing.
“If you always have to feel great or feel inspired after a piece of music, then that’s okay. Listen to that music,” he says. “I just wasn’t really interested in producing that.”
It’s Guy Fawkes Night in London. Fireworks are going off outside his home, and the frontman has warned that his dog might bark when his wife returns. It’s a strangely domestic setting for a conversation about the “hideousness of the nuclear family and modern life and polite society”.
The contrast is a fitting introduction to “Benny’s Video”, released alongside the announcement of the band’s fourth album, Compañero, due March 12th, 2027.
The single follows August’s “Things Take Time”, and lands after an emphatic Australian homecoming: an intimate Thirroul show sold out in 45 seconds, while two nights at the Sydney Opera House disappeared within minutes.
The song’s propulsive synths offer an almost euphoric rush. Its narrator offers no such reassurance.
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“I think anyone who’s had any kind of the misfortune of having to interact with me on a conversational level knows that the macabre nature of how I approach life tends to find its way to death and misery somehow,” Le’aupepe observes drily.
The song takes its name from Michael Haneke’s 1992 film, Benny’s Video. Le’aupepe came to it through the band’s visual collaborator and their shared interest in the filmmaker’s The Seventh Continent. What caught him was the director’s refusal to tell viewers how to feel.
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“I liked the detachment. I liked the non-judgment,” Le’aupepe says. “I found it really an interesting meditation on death that otherwise I wouldn’t have really pondered or considered.”
He is accustomed to thinking about mortality through emotion, senses and spirituality. Haneke showed him something colder.
“It’s a good film about media violence, but it’s a great film about the hideousness of the nuclear family and modern life and polite society,” Le’aupepe says.
That tension runs through references to “middle class evasion”, raising children and nice holidays, alongside resentment and violent imagery. There’s something inherently unsettling about the narrator. When I mention this, Le’aupepe doesn’t rush to defend them.
“One thing about the movie that I do like is that the baddie, he’s played by Arno Frisch. I don’t know, he’s almost fucking sympathetic in a way,” he says. “And I think that was the thing that… There’s a protagonist of this song. Are they sympathetic? I don’t know. It’s about asking that question. I don’t know if it’s interesting, but it’s interesting to me.”
The final refrain, “Just give the people what they want”, is similarly slippery.
“I think at the time, it was 34 years ago, 1992, actually when I was born, the people were the middle classes, the comfortable masses,” he explains, referencing the audiences consuming news, film and emerging video-game violence in the early ‘90s.
“I think the idea of the people is a bit more of a nebulous thing in this,” he continues. “I just wanted to find a phrase that was not aphoristic or telling people how to live their lives necessarily, but it was something that could be repeated over and over again. ‘Just give the people what they want’. Who are the people and what is this thing that they want? It’s one of those things where I wanted to be less direct about it while also having something that was a very direct command.”
I suggest it could also speak to the demands placed on musicians and what audiences expect of them. He considers the notion, then swerves away from any grand industry manifesto.
“I don’t have any fucking didacticism for how people should be treating artists. I don’t fucking know, what do I know about shit? But there’s something about media and entertainment and boredom and misery and modern life that, maybe on a subconscious level there’s a substantive approach to that,” he says. “I don’t have any fucking big, brave things to say about the music industry because I just don’t care enough about it.”
What he does care about, however, is contrast. “Benny’s Video” is a prime example, its synth-driven momentum juxtaposed against the ugliness of its subject matter.
“Yeah, I love the contrast,” he says. “What’s really interesting is that the film is all about contrast. He does something horrible and then he just goes and gets a yoghurt and starts eating a yoghurt. I like these things about contrast. I like that they can be wrapped in the themes or the lyrics of this relatively macabre subject matter, wrapped in something that sort of feels euphoric and melodic. I think that’s a lot of life now. I think that’s a lot of digital life at least.”
He wanted that incongruity in the music, too, drawing on a particular era of early ’90s New Order for inspiration.
“There’s a lot of sorrow encased in joy in that period of that band’s existence, and I was really drawn to that,” he explains.
I mention “Magnolia”, another Gang of Youths song that sets difficult emotions against an enormous musical release; an observation that takes the musician somewhere unexpected. Le’aupepe tells me he’s started playing it quietly live, allowing its emotional character to come through differently.
“It’s not like I don’t love the fucking big bombastic indie rock fucking shit that we usually do,” he says. “But it has a different flavour to me now as I’m getting older and I’ve moved through life and the band have moved through these kind of periods and we’re at the other end of 15 years, nearly.”
Then, as though surprised by the thought himself, he adds: “I haven’t fucking thought about that in ages, so that’s probably a good question.”
It’s not only the arrangements he’s reassessing. Where 2022’s angel in realtime drew intimately on his father’s death, identity and family history, Compañero — and tracks like “Benny’s Video” — finds him writing beyond the facts of his own life. I ask whether he regrets giving away so much of himself on the previous record, or whether the change is simply another way to create.
“Just a different way of creating,” he responds. “If you don’t put yourself out there, the cunts fucking take it from you anyway. That’s fucking how it works, isn’t it? You dance, you dance, and if you stop dancing, they’ll fucking make you do it.”
For all his openness in music, Le’aupepe is private elsewhere. He doesn’t have social media, and asserts that not every life experience requires a musical monument.
“There’s plenty of things that happen in life that you don’t fucking feel like you need to make an opus about.”
There was another, less dramatic explanation for the change: things were relatively good, and he didn’t have another personal cataclysm to turn into a record. He was tired of the familiar process of living through something and then revisiting it years later in music.
“I want to experiment with what it is to actually be an artist, be a songwriter instead of have to fucking work through all this stuff,” he says. “What is the muscle inside my brain and my heart saying about writing music that is from my personal framework, but it doesn’t have to be constantly related to my life and my feelings and my history?”
“It’s its own type of liberation,” he adds. “I think there was maybe a clinging element when I wanted to share all this stuff. I wanted to be like, ‘This is me, this is me, this is me.’ Now I don’t really give a shit.”
The freedom to invent isn’t a licence to be emotionally dishonest. When I ask whether something must be lived to be truthful, he poses theories about nursery rhyme inspirations before he lands on David Bowie.
“Do you think Bowie was floating around in space in an actual fucking tin can?” he jokes. “It’s about the emotion. It’s about using images, and it’s about using a musical and visual language when you’re writing lyrics and writing melodies and stuff in order to convey something that’s true.”
Suddenly, he turns that thought on its head. “And then also the cynical part of me saying, fucking who gives a shit if it’s true?”
That delight in complicating his own argument leads back to the song’s unease. Gang of Youths have built a devoted audience partly through their ability to make enormous, vulnerable music feel like a communal release. “Benny’s Video” deliberately withholds the tidy ending.
“Absolutely,” Le’aupepe says when I raise it. “One thing I’ve always cared about is that there’s not really easy answers to anything in life. There’s not a feel-good fucking moment at the end.”
Growing up in church left him preoccupied with death, God and the spiritual world. It hasn’t made him an advocate for neat moral conclusions.
“But tying everything up with these neat little categories like black and white, yes, no, good, bad, right, wrong, evil, good, it doesn’t really work in real life.”
For “Benny’s Video” and the record around it, he’s more interested in “asking questions and posing questions instead of fucking having some super sure didactic response”.
“Discomfort’s interesting because discomfort is not some fucking great enemy,” he says. “It’s a challenge, and I think all of us have to move through these challenges. I don’t know necessarily that art can save people from feeling discomfort, just discomfort’s a fact of life.”
He recalls a movie intro that irritated him — cars honking incessantly for the first seven to eight minutes. A friend told him that sometimes art is supposed to annoy you. Le’aupepe has grown more receptive to that idea, and even less certain about the supposed healing power of music.
“I think art can heal people… I don’t know, fucking can it?” he says. “Then it’s not always going to be able to tie things up, and I’m okay with that.”
Writing beyond the autobiographical has opened up new possibilities.
“Also, I got loads of records in me now. I used to think I was done. I used to think, ‘Fuck it, not for me anymore.’ Now, let’s keep going,” he says. “I think that’s exciting because if I end this record on a question, I can just ask more later.”
Le’aupepe has been living in the UK for more than a decade now. He doesn’t credit his evolving songwriting to time spent overseas, though.
“It’s more of an age thing,” he says. “You can take me out of Australia, but you can’t fucking take Australia out of me.”
Sydney, especially, remains home in an emotional sense.
“I feel like Australia owns us and claims us and represents us, and we represent it,” he says. “And Sydney, it’s my hometown. And do I miss it? Yeah, fuck yeah.”
With the recent Australian shows selling out almost immediately, Gang of Youths have plenty more on the horizon. The band will headline Tasmania’s Party in the Paddock on February 5th, before heading to the US for Coachella in April, having just been announced on the festival’s 2027 lineup. But what about a wider tour of Australia?
“No, you have to work hard,” he jokes when I press him, before admitting he’s largely out of the loop and doesn’t know the details, but offers one placating statement: “We’ll do other things in Australia for sure.”
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First comes Compañero. Its title means companion or comrade — an unexpectedly tender name for an album preoccupied with mortality. On “Benny’s Video”, at least, that tenderness isn’t offered as an easy escape from the ugliness of the world. The music surges, the characters remain complicated, and the questions hang in the air.
Le’aupepe seems perfectly happy to leave them there. After all, he has more songs to write.
“Benny’s Video” is out now. Compañero follows March 12th, 2027 and can be pre-saved now. Gang of Youths headline Party in the Paddock on Friday, February 5th, 2027, at Quercus Park, Tasmania.
