Robbie Bennett Unveils Two New Solo Albums Set for December Release

Keyboardist Robbie Bennett of The War on Drugs has two new albums scheduled to drop before the year ends. Both Steloken and Circulation are set to arrive on December 11 via American Dreams, contributing 29 new tracks to Bennett’s solo catalog. He revealed one song from each record yesterday; stream “Sister” from Steloken and “The Light on Your Face” from Circulation below.

These albums follow Bennett’s 2020 solo debut, Permanent World. He crafted each track using the same keyboard he plays in The War on Drugs, routing MIDI from an acoustic player piano into an Oberheim OB-X8 synthesizer so both instruments could play simultaneously. He subsequently added layers of Fender Rhodes, vocoder, and Soma Terra, a “polyphonic microtonal synthesizer with a gyroscope and pressure-sensitive sensors.” “I want the music to be like you’re walking through an unfamiliar place you want to keep exploring and never have to circle back to where you started,” Bennett explained in press materials.

Bennett also recently featured on The War on Drugs’ first new song since 2022, “Who’s That.” The band has not released a studio album since 2021, but they did return in 2024 with their second career live album, aptly titled Live Drugs Again.