Otto Benson

Before the dim pop architect Otto Benson ever sang on an album he released under his own name, he had a very wild ride through confusing corners of the modern music industry. As a teenager in New York, Benson would upload demos for his band Foam onto SoundCloud, where anyone else might listen in. Some of his ideas steadily gained traction outside of his friend circle, though, resulting in tracks he’d made under the moniker Memo Boy going viral on TikTok. One of those tracks, “Insomniac,” got slowed and sped and sampled, used to soundtrack so many dark thoughts by so many kids online it was presented as evidence in a Congressional hearing. Benson compared the result, unhappily, to Pepe the Frog. “It’s depressing indie music that I made in my bedroom,” he once said. “It’s like the dark, introspective, inner-world kind of leaking out into the internet.”

As a reaction against his own unintentional contribution to online despair, Benson—who has made lots of music under lots of different handles, including ebullient instrumental glitch-pop simply as Otto—headed to California and shifted his sound. He gave 2022’s beautiful Songs Before Bed away for free through his WNOADIARWB label, a sort of corrective for any damage done. And on New Year’s Eve 2025, he quietly issued Peanut, finally revealing his voice, a warm and wry lilt that recalled the glory days of Red House Painters and the monotone charm of Mac DeMarco. Framed by acoustic guitars and gilded by pedal steel sighs and Rhodes sparkles, the songs on Peanut document new depths of despair—“a tumor…growing bigger,” “I’ve fallen down/into a crater and buried in the ground”—but set them to wondrous little pop tunes, ways to make it bearable. Benson writes music for whistling while you work, with that work being the very effort of enduring.