There have been a handful of occasions where I have picked up a song that has been so outstandingly good that an earworm memory is welded into my brain. One recent example is All That Matters by Beneath Eden. How I came to listen to this remains a mystery. Even more mysterious is the band themselves. But following some detective work, I managed to make contact with Halle James, and theirs is a story that needs to be told.
Having initially trained as a Jazz vocalist, Halle James earned a degree in Cabaret Performance and now writes lyrics and melodies for Beneath Eden. The band features bassist Beth Venables, drummer Tom Adkins and guitarist Michael Cary.
All That Matters was the Beneath Eden debut single, released in May 2024. I was really struck by the opening guitar riff that really sucks you into the song. “That’s Michael all over,” Halle says.
The track was the first song that the band wrote. “I was staying at uni in Chichester,” Halle told MetalTalk. “The boys came down, and it was the first song that we finished. We were sat in my living room, and Michael just played this thing. It was nothing, ‘cos obviously there were no drums. It was literally just him unplugged in my living room.
“We all just kind of looked at each other, thinking we can do this. The band always work on things instrumentally first, and then I get inspiration from that. It happened probably within about half an hour.”
Halle James takes her inspiration from all corners of the music spectrum. “When I was growing up, my dad was a proper punk man,” she says. “My brother loved 2000s indie rock. I didn’t have too much hard rock influence. I went to university and I trained as a jazz singer, which is weird for a lead singer of a rock band. But I’ve always loved rock, so when I met them [Beneath Eden], I was like, oh, this is me.”
There is a one-minute video for All That Matters on YouTube. The story behind this is more than just the average, typical tale of grassroots music and explains the wonderful cinematic quality to the film. “That was meant initially just as a promo video,” Halle says. “As uni students, we’re skint. I did a favour for someone in a film degree at my university. He said,’ Oh, how can I repay you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I need a promo video.’
“So it was literally free. Everyone in the back of the video are the people who were on my course with me. I sent a message to the group chat saying, ‘meet in this lecture hall at this time and just go on your phone, pretend you’re in a lecture’. They just sat there in silence for a couple of hours.”
The latest single, Too Much, has another one-minute video clip. “It’s not the whole song,” Halle says. “Kids on a budget. We found a guy who is really insanely talented. His name’s Kersten Luts. He gave us a really good price, but we couldn’t stretch it any further than that.”
Too Much is one of their heaviest songs and a great introduction to the band.
Beneath Eden have released four songs via Spotify to date. They have played a handful of gigs, and you can catch them at LVLS in London on 22 August 2025. With eight songs written, this is a rare chance for everyone to hear the whole set.
This means you will hear the song Lighthouse, which was picked up by BBC Introducing. “I got to come into work and say that I’ve been on the radio,” Halle smiles.
“We got two more singles lined up for release later this summer and autumn,” Halle says. “We’ve got a couple of real newbies that have been written in the last few weeks and some old ones that kind of got lost when we were recording because they didn’t fit. But we like to bring them out for live shows, ’cause I always find what hits differently on stage might really work in the studio.”
With a cabaret performance degree behind her, you imagine this must help Halle on stage. “It’s made me much more comfortable on stage,” she says. “It taught me less about vocals. I will take the credit for that, as I did that myself. [The degree is] more about how the progress of a show should go. How to speak and when to speak, and when you’ve spoken too much and when to stop. It made me more comfortable with being a frontwoman.”
The story behind the lyrics in All That Matters came from a “weird time” in Halle’s life before she and bassist Beth Venables, who is also a Classical Tubist, got together.
“At that time, I was putting myself in really unhealthy relationships with people that I had no backing behind my feelings towards,” Halle says. “I found myself instantly obsessing with people and playing to the person that they wanted me to be, but it wasn’t necessarily true.
“When I came out, there was lots of, ‘oh, you’ve changed’, or, ‘I don’t know who you are anymore.’ But I had never been more myself in that moment. So All That Matters is half about that mocking of me being obsessed with people, and then how you have never seen my face like this before. Like, I’ve changed.
“The chorus, the “you…”, and the “I…”, in my head, that sounds like kids taunting in a playground. I feel like that’s me taking the mick out of myself in a way. I was feeling very resentful and regretful when I was writing the song. So I was taking the mick out of myself for giving some energy to people that didn’t deserve it.”
With the other songs released so far, Halle says her writing process is like a therapy session. “I hear a song, I hear a melody, it doesn’t mean anything,” She says. “Words come out, and I’m thinking, this’ll do for now. Then I realised that I’m just speaking what I’m thinking inside.
“It’s almost like when I’m in the writing process, someone else is taking over my head and doing it for me. Then I look back on it and I think that’s what I was feeling at the time. A pride in all of our songs mean something that was hidden deep in me.”
“Too Much takes that emotional intelligence and chucks it out the window,” Halle says. “It’s literally about people who talk too much. But then, when I worked on the song further, I didn’t even write anything more. But I realised it was again, highlighting things I felt more deeply. I was in a relationship where they were very chatty and outgoing and took up so much space in a room.
“They would talk so much, and then when it came to important conversations where we needed communication, it was radio silence. That has done a lot to me and how I communicate in relationships now and how I am with friendships.
“It’s kind of full circle. Where the song was just about someone talking too much, now it’s kind of about me. I feel the need to over-talk now until the situation’s fixed. I give too much and I’m fixing too much. In the end, it turned out kind of like a letter to myself.”
It takes a lot of time and effort to build a band up. For Beneath Eden, the idea of releasing one song at a time is to build momentum, “so that we have more excitement,” Halle says, “rather than chucking all out for everyone and then going silent for a year.”
With the two new songs planned for release later this year, there is a chance that we will see an EP release at some point. “They fit really well with all of the others,” Halle says. “So from Too Much onwards, I think it will end up being six songs going onto an EP.”
To get to this point, Beneath Eden had one successful fundraiser. “We’ve got so much from it,” Halle says. “We literally wouldn’t have been able to get back in the studio if it wasn’t for it. It kept us going.”
To be able to raise money this way is one big sign of a band’s quality. Their fan base is rising, and their music deserves much wider attention.
At LVLS in Hackney Wicks on 22 August 2025, you get the chance to hear the whole Beneath Eden set, live. This will be something special.
You can find out more about Beneath Eden on Instagram or at linktr.ee/beneathedenband.
