With nearly half a million followers, Justus Bennetts is slowly taking over TikTok FYP’s on phones worldwide with his single “Cool Kids”—an infectious smash teeming with nostalgic teenage angst. Brash, endearing, and emotional, Bennetts’ “Cool Kids” appears to be the perfect anthem for Gen Z as they attempt to make sense of the world around them and figure out their place within it. And Bennetts, similar to his contemporaries, is no different. With honest and revealing songs like “Cool Kids” and “Bad Day,” Bennetts’ artistry blends his love of rock and rap music while incorporating themes of identity, perseverance, authenticity, and making sure his fans take stock in doing what they love as that is one of the best ways to love yourself. “Just do it. There’s no bad thing coming out of doing something that you love, no negative thing thats going to stop you from chasing what you love,” Bennetts says. “Forget what other people think of you; so many people in this world have opinions of you, and that doesn’t matter. Go with your own flow and everything is going to work out.”
I got a chance to sit down with the rising star via Zoom call as we chatted about his rising popularity on TikTok, creative writing process, disdain for fast fashion, passionate stance on helping to preserve our planet and, of course, his upcoming EP.
Marc: Nice to meet you, man. I want to take this time to get a bit into your origin story. People seem to know about your rising TikTok fame, but what can you tell us about Justus and how he got here?
Justus: I started everything in Seattle. I was raised by my dad with my sister, and he put me on to a lot of his music growing up. My mom was musical, and my uncle was in a band, so I was surrounded by music my whole life. When I was fourteen, my dad got a job in North Carolina, and so we moved across the country. I was a freshman in high school, didn’t know anybody at this new school, and so I would be by my lonesome, smoking weed and listening to music all the time. I got into the Hip-Hop scene at the time—Chance the Rapper, J.Cole, Logic—before I was listening to a lot of Green Day, Linkin Park, Pearl Jam, all the music my dad listened to and once I got to North Carolina, the music thing changed for me. When I listened to J. Cole speak all of this stuff, I got really inspired to begin writing music; I had to do it myself. I wasn’t really that musical; I had just learned to play the guitar, I found some beats on YouTube, I began recording music and posting it on my SoundCloud for fun, and up until about a year ago—seven years later—I had a job selling cars, feeling tired of what I was doing, staring out of the window wondering about a better life. And around the same time, I had decided I would start a studio in my house after I got linked up with a good friend of mine; I started recording my music and getting it properly mixed and engineered. I would post that on TikTok and just grind. I quit my job to just focus on the studio, and it all came together. I didn’t know what I was doing. I posted videos every day and worked in the studio to pay for rent. And now we’re here! My manager hit me off of one song that I posted on TikTok that did 180,000 views or something like that. He linked me with some producers and writers to finish the song, we put it out, did a little campaign behind it, and then I linked up with him in New York where we did “Nightstand” and just kept building relationships with these people.
M: Such a whirlwind type of journey. Couple that with the streaming age where it seems like people are here today and gone tomorrow, but you seem to be building something that could potentially be here longer than the streaming era projects for artists like yourself. What are you doing to make sure that happens? Are you working on a debut album of some kind? Or are you currently pushing singles to ramp up engagement on your socials?
J: We got to a point where I just wanted to put out a bunch of new music for people to listen to, so that led us to agree on releasing a project early next year.
M: Do you have a title you could share with us today?
J: Yeah, it’s called Lifelong Daydream. And it’ll feature “Cool Kids” and “Bad Day,” and hopefully eight new songs. So that’s what we’re working towards right now, finishing the EP and probably putting out a single or two before that.
M: Is there anything you could tell us about it? I don’t want to get sniped or something from asking you to reveal undisclosed information (they both laugh) because I know you’re…how do I say this…you have some secrets we can’t get into yet. Is there anything about this EP that you can tell us, maybe the direction of the work, the genre, how much of yourself are you going to bleed into these lyrics?
J: It’s going to be a lot of me; it will be my whole thought process behind everything going on, everything that’s been happening. I like to keep it real.
M: What’s the creative thought process in keeping it real for you? We hear that a lot, and it could mean something different for different people; you gave us “Cool Kids” and “Bad Day,” so I have to wonder where you’re taking us when keeping it real on this new EP.
J: Well, with every song that I do, I like to switch up the process, but I always try to inject that piece of me in the work; that’s how I keep it real. We do creative things that we do the whole time, but I mainly like to keep it different. There are some people that I work with who work differently, so catering to everybody in the session is very important to me when collaborating in general. So, I never lose sight of myself, but creatively we’ll try a bunch of different things; we might try a melody on the guitar and work around that, maybe have a phrase in my notepad that we can work around or a drum pattern and maybe that’ll vibe with us. But we try to work it differently each time to get different results.
M: With your success on TikTok, have you guys constructed a game plan to capitalize off of that or are you guys trying to be as organic in the music process as possible?
J: TikTok is one of the big platforms that we’ve been using throughout this whole time to kickstart this whole thing and accelerate. But now the game plan is just posting snippets on TikTok to see how they do. Still, we got PR, people planning promo, we’re doing interviews with different people to promote things, but TikTok is one of the main [platforms] we use to kickstart everything and get the streams, pre saves, and the people – it all trickles down.
M: I remember watching this interview…the artist I can’t really remember. Still, the artist in question talked about how they take TikTok into consideration when creating certain sounds. Has that ever crossed your mind? Has it ever been a question of “how can I play off of this idea and gear this song towards that audience”?
J: We definitely take it into consideration when making a song, and sometimes it just ends up being a TikTok song when we’re finished with it. It’s never something where we go into the studio and say, “yeah, let’s make a TikTok song,” but I’m really just trying to make good music that resonates with people, so that viewpoint alone has helped the platform that we have now.
M: I know you mentioned Green Day and J. Cole earlier in the interview; definitely, two sides of a similar coin-rock and rap go hand in hand. Can you see yourself doing an all-rock album and then turning around doing an all-rap album? Has that ever crossed your mind?
J: That’s been in my mind from the very beginning ever since we began doing this type of music—music that is much more pop-leaning. Once I build a bigger platform I want to put out—I have in my notes full old 2000s rock music that I enjoy listening to and would love to make my own version of that style.
M: We need that man.
J: (laughing) Yeah, I definitely want to put that out because I know there are a lot of different people out there, and I like to cater to everybody. Everyone likes something different, so I can resonate with more people if I can make something different.
M: That’s interesting because early 2000s rock is definitely missing from the musical landscape right now. So, my eyes lit up when you mentioned that you were working on something of that ilk. It would be dope to see you go full Green Day (they both laugh). But I feel like nobody would really bat an eye, and a lot of people would like it. Honestly, I feel people want that right now. They’re looking for a release.
J: It’s definitely what people need!
M: Yeah! And I know it is a ways off, but would we get any glimpses of this rock or rapping ability on this upcoming EP?
J: Definitely. I like to hint at this sort of thing in my music; in “Cool Kids,” you get a small hint of it, and the same thing with “Bad Day,” it really shines in the chorus where you can hear a thousand people screaming. But yeah, you get hints of it in my music, it’s not leaning super one way, but you can definitely hear it.
M: I love that! So do you have your eyes set on music right now, or are there any other endeavors you have plans to dabble in? Sync-licensing, fashion, maybe get “Cool Kids” in Fortnite (they both laugh) because I can definitely see that. Do you have any plans for business outside of music?
J: It’s one of my goals to write songs for other people. Writing songs for others has always interested me, and I just want to help other people make good music; if I can help in any way, I want to dip my finger in as many things as possible. And then with my merch line, I don’t have any merch out yet—
M: Really?
J: Yeah, it’s mainly because I’m not a big fan of the whole fast fashion thing and its effect on the environment. So, I’m trying to create a sustainable merch line that’s true to me. I don’t want to be wasteful in these fashion endeavors, and with my merch, I don’t want to contribute to carbon emissions or anything like that. So, take my time with the quality of the clothes so that when the shirt is maybe in a Goodwill sometime down the line or maybe it’s in a dump somewhere, it’s not going to be creating harmful things for the environment.
M: You sound very passionate about the environment. Is this a cause that you’re very much into?
J: Yeah, I feel like everybody should be at least like a little bit. I was a kid who, when I was a kid, and I would see people throw their recycle in the trash can, I would call them out on it, and I would go and put their water bottle in the recycling bin (they laugh). But it’s something that I’ve always been passionate about because I want to have kids, and I want my kids to have kids and enjoy this planet because it’s amazing. Definitely, something that I have always been passionate about.
M: So, what you’re telling me is that you’re going to have a really awesome clean water line in the future where you’re giving clean water to other countries like Jaden Smith.
J: Of course, I want to do everything I can to help.
M: That’s sick; I didn’t even know that about you; look at us, man. So with that being said, would you jump into high fashion collaborations if given a chance? Maybe like a Louis Vuitton collab?
J: It’s something that I’ve always been interested in but never like—right now, all the clothes that I have I got from my dad’s old collection of Marshall’s (they laugh), but it’s never been something that I’ve been fully invested in, but I do feel that clothes are something to use to show people who you are and express yourself. It’s interesting, and I really want to dive deeper through a collaboration one day.
M: Taking all that you said thus far, I could definitely see how “Cool Kids” would hit so hard for you because if you’re a kid having these thoughts that are different from the norm, you would definitely get bullied, and I was bullied myself, so I know a thing or two about that (laughs). And with your train of thought in discussing carbon emissions, being against fast fashion would put a target on your back. So what did you put into “writing “Cool Kids” to create a possible anthem for a generation? Did you tap into you being someone outside of the norm?
J: I tapped into not only the people that I knew in high school because there were a lot of “cool kids” in my school who were nice people. A lot of the cool kids in my school were really smart and paid attention to the environment like me, but what I mean in my song “Cool Kids” it’s more about the trope of others being looked down upon because they didn’t have the same views as they did. It’s all the arrogant people, ignorant people who don’t believe in others because they don’t share their ideas. So I tapped into a lot of people I met through people that I worked with selling cars, all had these same ideals and wanted people to feel sorry for them, and they just fed off this negative energy and gave negative energy because they were too sad to admit it.
M: So “Cool Kids” is a lot deeper than what we initially thought; this is like a philosophical lesson in itself—this idea of individuality. How important is it to share with your fans this idea of individuality and speaking from a place of authenticity?
J: It’s very important, and just being an artist in general, it’s important to be yourself. For a lot of people, you can tell whether they’re being untrue to themselves, but just a lot of people that don’t get it, they don’t understand that you get what you give. So, it’s a tough road for sure.
M: Yeah, and the idea and the question of “who are you?” It gets a little scary when faced with these existential questions. This is getting kind of deep, very much weed-talk.
J: This is most definitely weed-talk (they share a laugh).
M: And even in the concept of “Bad Day,”—the song is catchy, but when you think about it, am I going to let one bad day define me, or could I bounce back? Speaking of “Bad Day,” how does it feel for your friend Remy who had to bounce back from his bad day? Did he give you slack for that?
J: Well, it wasn’t necessarily that he had a bad day; it was more because of this lady who gave him sass on an elevator for no reason. She was probably having a bad day. He was trying to get on the elevator but had to be buzzed up because on the 10th floor, you need a card, so he had to get out of the elevator and tell the doorman to buzz him up, and the lady that he bumped into was freaking out and told him “I’m just trying to get upstairs,” and Remy said, “so am I!” So he gets in the elevator, and once he finally gets up to us, he just tells us that he wishes that lady had a bad day, and that’s pretty much what we based the entire song off of.
M: And to fill the song out, did you tap into anything from your own life? Failed relationships, friendships that made you go, “yeah, I need to use that.”?
J: Oh, yeah. There have been a lot of experiences from my life that involve me having a bad day or hoping people have a bad day. I had terrible roommates in the past, one in particular who pissed on my clothes because we didn’t have the same ideals in life.
M: And other than the EP, what can people expect from you in the coming year? Anything else or is the EP the primary focus?
J: The primary focus right now is definitely the EP. I have two more EPs worth of songs just in my phone right now that could be potential singles in the future, but that’s a story for another day. But the plan is EP, tour, getting shows, getting in front of my fans and connecting on a personal level face-to-face.
