Ben Seretan

Ben Seretan never seems to do anything halfway. His records are either filled-to-bursting with sounds, ideas, and personal mythology, erupting into catchy choruses and half-screamed mantras like the twangy tape hiss of 2016’s Bowl of Plums or the cathartic post-faith breakups of Youth Pastoral. Or they’re patient & unfurling, lyric-less & sprawling, like the 24-hour-long monolith My Life’s Work, a towering album of guitar clouds recorded straight through over three nights in summer, sunset to sunrise. In 2021 he released Cicada Waves, a serene album of piano soli captured amid the riotous sounds of the Appalachian Woods. And nearly every Thursday he publishes a new track and 1,000 words of writing via his long-running project My Big Break.
Newly signed to Tiny Engines, Seretan returned to guitar and hollering his head off in 2024 with ALLORA, recordings that have been cryptically referred to as his “insane Italian record” since the songs were first captured in the gnarly Venetian summer of 2019. Epic, sloppy, joyful, and cathartic, the album – recorded manically in under 72 hours – shows a band defiantly ripping sweaty joy from the jaws of despair.