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by Daniel Bromfield
Ben Estrada claims he’s “drawn to the macabre,” so maybe it’s appropriate that he has the kind of voice you expect to hear talking back to you from the screen in an old Hammer horror film. Both when speaking and in his music as BendreTheGiant, the 26-year-old Gresham-born musician has a dark and velvety vocal quality, which intriguingly contrasts with the breezy yacht rock he composed with close collaborator Delos Erickson for last year’s debut EP, Get Well Soon!
Estrada leans further into this darkness on his upcoming EP, Wading in the Deep End—he celebrates the release March 1 at Alberta Street Pub before heading on tour down the coast. “Move,” the opening track, includes a threat to punch you in the face. And though his sound is still silky enough, a hint of aggro rock lurks in the margins, a kinship with the Northwest’s endemic brands of loud and depressive guitar music.
“I feel it’s really inspired by a grunge era I got into in high school,” Estrada says. “I really got into Alice In Chains and different bands like that. I tried to hear that raw, emotional rock sound and see how we could fit that into an R&B track in a way.”
That uncomfortably raw energy comes through in “Homeless,” the EP’s most harrowing song, which was inspired by a traumatic period as a child when Estrada’s parents split up and the family home was subsequently foreclosed, leading to the young Estrada and his father spending a winter with no heat.
“[Houselessness] was a real fear at the time,” Estrada says. “I think I knew at the end of the day we had family that we could move to, but it was definitely something that always stayed in my mind.”
Estrada wrote the demos for Wading in the Deep End during another difficult period of his life, when he moved to Seattle to be close to family. While splitting time between a remote job with Google and a gig as a caregiver, Estrada threw his back out while lifting a patient and had to take weeks off of work, recording demos on a MIDI keyboard while incapacitated.
“A lot of the music that came out of that period was talking about the struggles I was dealing with emotionally,” Estrada says. “It’s very much tied to my fear of being houseless, especially when I was a kid and later dealing with financial struggles and being unable to work. I didn’t have a musical community in Seattle, I was living with my partner at the time, and I didn’t have a source to take this to.”
Sensing a change was in order, Estrada broke up with his partner and relocated to Eugene in late 2023, moving in with Erickson. The two had met in junior high school and had a long history of playing music together, winning a high school choir competition with their vocal trio and playing in a jazz-funk band called Debt.
When Estrada brought Erickson the demos he’d recorded in Seattle, they started building them into full and formidable songs. A songwriting partnership soon jelled, with Estrada as singer-songwriter and Erickson as composer-arranger. They worked together to build one of Estrada’s demos, an instrumental called “Mimosa,” into a full-fledged pop song called “I Probably Shouldn’t Be Here,” which became BendreTheGiant’s first single and came out in December 2023.
“We started immediately getting gigs and forming a band,” Estrada says. “[Erickson] is very jazz-forward, so he brings a lot of that improvisation to the group, but he’s also a great composer and arranger, so he was able to take my songs and hear what horn parts might sound cool or what guitar parts might sound cool.”
Estrada and Erickson moved to Portland together last August, and in December, they received a grant from MusicOregon’s Echo Fund, which funds “creative, non-performance projects that support new growth and spur creative and career development.” They’re planning to use the money to record a third EP, which they aim to put out in August before capping the series with a full-length.
“It’s really helpful we don’t have to take out our personal funds anymore to pay for something like this,” says Estrada, who currently works as a budtender on top of recording, gigging and touring. “Because of that grant, we’re able to just focus and put all our money and attention into one place and spend it on what’s next.”
SEE IT: BendreTheGiant at Alberta Street Pub, 1036 NE Alberta St., 503-284-7665, albertastreetpub.com. 8 pm Saturday, March 1. $10.