Benjamin Shaw
Exciting Opportunities: A Collection of Singles and Sadness
Audio Antihero
A career retrospective of Benjamin Shaw, Audio Antihero's wildly underrated songwriter and noise-maker.
Debuting alongside Audio Antihero with ‘I Got the Pox, the Pox is What I Got EP‘ in 2009, the Canada-born, Blackpool-raised and Melbourne-residing Benjamin Shaw became the most indispensable person in this little label’s history through a series of albums which were bitterly beautiful and eccentrically emotional. From ‘There’s Always Hope, There’s Always Cabernet‘ to ‘Megadead,’ Shaw found and discarded sounds and styles as both his nihilism and empathy clashed within the limitless contradictions of modern life. His work was often polarising, and saw him as described as “Pop’s outsider,” “an Alternative idol,” “a miserable fucker,” and “a freak” by bemused writers and DJs at Drowned in Sound, DIY Mag, The Line of Best Fit, Gold Flake Paint, CLASH Magazine, The Skinny, and BBC 6 Music. As Shaw grew increasingly uncomfortable with the ill-fitting “singer-songwriter” tag, he stopped performing live for five years, only returning briefly in 2019 to play Austria’s Donaufestival and an intimate show in Australia before he found greater comfort and freedom under the Megadead name in 2020.
Shaw is a unique talent who evolved from scrappy indie folk to glistening electronica while making every stop along the way something special and memorable. He may at times have thought that his music represented the darkness of this world, but in truth, it was always the light.
Praise for Benjamin Shaw:
“I feel like I’m being wrapped in a soft experimental lullaby… Every track is an unexpected and rewarding rabbit hole.” – INDIE SHUFFLE
“…Ravishingly bizarre and violently self-loathing. The interplay between Shaw’s opulent, skyward musical arrangements and his lyrics—drab at their brightest, self-threatening at their darkest—is, in a voyeuristic sense, strangely difficult to look away from.” – THE ALTERNATIVE
“It’s a reminder that some of the most powerful emotions can bloom from the simplest of raw moments, and Shaw is an expert at crafting just those instances.” – DROWNED IN SOUND
“You wouldn’t want everyone (or anyone else) to sound to like Benjamin Shaw but I’m delighted someone does.” – THE LINE OF BEST FIT
“Hidden gem – 8/10.” – DIY MAG
“…Makes you see customary things in a whole new light… drapes an arm across your shoulders when there’s nobody else around, a quiet whisper in the ear telling you that, yes, life is fucking rough but not always, not every minute of every day.” – GOLD FLAKE PAINT
“With a voice that sounds like it was scraped from the bottom of a well at the bottom of the world, Benjamin Shaw is an unlikely candidate for making purely beautiful music. And yet the languorous, delicate “Goodbye, Kagoul World” is just that.” – KDHX
“Benjamin Shaw is an outcast, a loner, a maverick and a freak. All of these are compliments.” – CLASH
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