Benny Sings – 22 Durnham Dew
Find “22 Durnham Dew” by Benny Sings on plusfm and plusfm Chill, taken from the album of the same name.
Label : Stones Throw Records
© 2026 Stones Throw Records
Benny Sings has spent two decades as pop’s most reliably chill craftsman—a Dutch singer-songwriter and producer whose easy, yacht-rock-adjacent melodies have made him a favorite collaborator for artists like Mac DeMarco, Tom Misch, and Rex Orange County, even as his own solo records stayed comparatively low-key. 22 Durnham Dew follows 2023’s Kenny Beats collaboration Young Hearts with a sharp turn toward domestic life. Benny has described the record as coming out of buying and renovating a house, and the album’s title—which reads like a street address—suggests the record is named quite literally for the place where much of this new material was made.
That shift comes through in who’s actually on the record. 22 Durnham Dew was reportedly created with direct involvement from his wife and daughter, and its songs work through fatherhood, adult contentment, and the small logistics of domestic life rather than the romantic material that’s defined most of his catalog. The guest list underlines how far Benny is willing to stretch his own sound to fit that material: Baby Rose brings a smoky, soul-inflected low end to “Do No Harm,” while “Be Myself” pairs Tune-Yards’ angular vocal style with French-Chilean rapper and singer Ana Tijoux, an unlikely combination that pulls the record briefly away from its otherwise gentle, sun-warmed default. Elijah Fox, a regular presence these days in L.A.’s jazz-adjacent pop scene, turns up on “Real Person,” a title that doubles as the clearest statement of the album’s guiding idea.
Benny Sings – 22 Durnham Dew
None of this abandons what’s made Benny reliable in the first place—the chord voicings still lean on the same soft-jazz harmony he’s used since his earliest records, and his voice remains as unhurried as ever. What’s changed is the subject matter, and by extension the stakes: a songwriter who spent years writing hooks for other people’s romantic entanglements is now writing directly about the particular, unglamorous work of staying settled in one place. Whether that’s a meaningful evolution or simply a change in scenery will likely depend on whether listeners came to Benny Sings for his craft or for his subject matter in the first place.
© Jason Ferguson/Qobuz