Ben Levin

“All the parts are very simple,” says Kion, “especially my bass part which is just an ostinato of eight notes.”

“It’s the closest thing we’ve written to a straightforward pop song,” concurs Swain. “We’ve been labelled ‘prog’ for a large portion of last year. That hasn’t sat badly with us, but we want to be more than ‘prog’. We were talking to The Dillinger Escape Plan and they said, ‘We’ve always felt that we never fit well into a genre. But we also work well within a lot of genres.’ We thought, ‘That’s how we feel.’”

Thomas Waber, the head of InsideOut Music, picked up on that quality in Bent Knee. Earlier this year, he signed the band to the record label, which is releasing Land Animal.

“When we were doing Say So, there was a little bit of dialogue with InsideOut, but they passed on that album,” says Swain. “The real reason that they turned around and said ‘We want to take you’ was because we toured with The Dillinger Escape Plan. Vince and I went to talk with Thomas over brunch in New York and he was very specific that the motivating factor was that we were appealing not only to prog fans, but also to a younger generation outside of prog.”

It’s a momentous, game-changing deal for Bent Knee. Swain can already testify to the power of the label’s distribution via Sony. On the day that first single Land Animal was released, she was impressed to discover that it was available on the leading streaming service in Japan, the country she grew up in.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a signed musician who was touring internationally,” says Baum. “Now that we’ve done all that, we are moving to the next thing. The landmarks continue to appear. It goes hand-in-hand with the album artwork, which has a character climbing a ladder that never ends.”

Since the record deal, the musicians haven’t given up their day jobs – which range from ride-share services to teaching music lessons – but they have scaled back their hours to facilitate extensive touring. They’ve yet to make any money. If these musicians tried to withdraw cash from an ATM, the machine would probably spit the card out. That’s why Levin wears broken glasses with a rubber band wrapped around the damaged lens.

“I had a home the last time we recorded an album,” laughs Wallace-Ailsworth, who has been sleeping on his bandmates’ couches over the past few months.

That resolute, cheerful attitude helps Bent Knee to survive from day to day, much like the creatures in the lyrics of Land Animal.

“When I sing the song live, I always like to look out at the audience and look at the people to say, ‘Don’t you dare give up, because we’re all in this together,’” says Swain. “But I’m also really just singing to myself.”

Land Animal is out now on InsideOut. For more information, see www.bentkneemusic.com.