welve thousand fans packed into a venue on a Saturday night, phones aloft, no masks in sight: it looks like a scene from another era, not October 2020. When Benee swaggers across the stage of Auckland’s Spark Arena, she may as well be the only pop star in the world: live music recently resumed in her native New Zealand. More concert-deprived, homebound fans watch enviously via livestream. “Stuff like that, I choose not to overthink,” 20-year-old Stella Bennett says of the magnitude of the event, speaking over Zoom two weeks later. “I’m already a huge fretter.” (In her broad “Nu-Zild” accent, it sounds like “fritter”; Benee, meanwhile, is pronounced “Benny”.) Her national tour narrowly missed disruption from a localised lockdown that ended a few weeks earlier. “Everyone is just so amped to be back at gigs,” she says. “It had this weird kind of new gig energy. I thought people would be really drunk, and some of them were, but a lot of them were just so focused.” An established star at home, Benee’s October homecoming should have been the triumphant cap to smaller jaunts around the US and Europe that were, inevitably, cancelled. The pandemic stalled her progress and forced her to move back into her parents’ Auckland home. Yet it also created the context for her breakout hit. Earlier in the year, her self-deprecating, breezily downbeat single Supalonely had taken off as a TikTok dance challenge. One day in February, three months after release, its newfound virality prompted a 400% increase in streams. After the lyrics – “I’m a lonely bitch!” – became newly relevant in lockdown, it continued to climb: Supalonely spent 17 weeks in the UK charts, peaking at No 18 in mid-April. Benee was still “pretty gutted” about her cancelled plans. “With music, it’s like you’re selling yourself: if people like this, and they like you, then you want to make them think that you’re worth staying for,” she says. “What happened to me with TikTok, it is kind of scary because it’s like: Shit, maybe I didn’t want this to happen right now, maybe I’ll get forgotten.” But by forcing almost all performance and press opportunities online, the pandemic brought the world to Benee. She made her US television debut from Auckland, performing for Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon, and collaborated remotely with Grimes, Lily Allen and the rapper Flo Milli. “Sometimes I feel a little bit guilty,” she says. “This year has been so hectic, and so horrible for so many people; it feels weird for me because it’s been the biggest year so far of my career. It feels very weird to celebrate anything when the world is literally falling apart.” There is an endearing goofiness and intimacy to Benee that feels like a tonic in this doomed year (and which distinguishes her from the major-label pop stars desperately trying to go viral on TikTok). Advised to follow up Supalonely’s smash with a “relatable” song, she instead wrote one called Snail, sung from the perspective of her favourite animal. She is entertaining company, even at a remove of 12,000 miles and 13 hours’ time difference, speaking in slang (“next-level shooketh” – meaning shocked) and revealing her self-doubt in a way that feels true of a new twentysomething. On World Mental Health Day, Benee shared seven photos of herself crying to show her 560,000 Instagram followers that “most people feel shit sometimes”. It is important to her that her fans get to know her beyond her breakout hits and music videos. “I would rather them know exactly what I’m about, and that I’m actually” – she searches for the right word – “an idiot, and just normal, and from New Zealand, and don’t take myself too seriously.” In New Zealand, there is less pressure for pop stars to fit a “certain mould”, Benee says. Naturally, some have made cheap comparisons between Benee and other young, female pop stars. But if she is anything like Billie Eilish, as some headlines have suggested, it’s that she shares that musician’s irreverent approach to presentation: Benee often performs in cat ears, cargo pants and a spacesuit, and was disgusted by the recent social media body-shaming of Eilish. “I’ve never been someone who likes to put her body out there anyways,” she says. And while she was frustrated to be dismissed early on as a “knock-off Lorde”, she envies how her countrywoman has balanced celebrity and anonymity. “She hasn’t been active on her Instagram for, like, a year, but she’s still relevant.” But being successful in a small country has sometimes left Benee feeling exposed. Early this year, two men tailed her home in their car, she says. “I’m sure it was completely harmless, but at the same time, it was also fucked up.” More recently, she has caught people speculating about her location on Instagram and filming her in public. She was already inclined towards paranoia. For the past four years, says Benee, “I’ve had this feeling that there’s someone outside, watching me; waiting for me to go to sleep so they can, like, take me in the night.” She laughs self-consciously. Her fear of abduction is the subject of Night Garden and Monsta: breezy songs set to unsettling lyrics. On Happen to Me, she frets about the possibility of dying in a plane crash or house fire. Determined to stop having to ask her mum to come and sleep on her bed, she saw a psychologist and pushed pause on horror films and “freaky stuff”. She now sleeps through the night, with the help of her new lockdown puppy: “As long as I have her on my bed every night, I’m actually OK.” Although Benee should have spent the year abroad, weathering the pandemic in New Zealand made her feel safe: prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the virus was recently ranked the best in the world. “It must be so scary having someone like frickin’ Trump or Bolsonaro leading your country,” she says. Benee had her first real brush with controversy before New Zealand’s election last month when a clip of her calling Judith Collins – the leader of the conservative National party, and Ardern’s political opponent – a “bitch” on stage in Wellington provoked headlines. “I know I shouldn’t have called another woman a bitch,” she says, somewhat unconvincingly, “but in this case, it was me not agreeing with someone’s politics. And when you are a musician, you can say whatever you want.” Election night itself coincided with Benee’s tour finale in Auckland. She paused the show to celebrate a historic win for Ardern and for Chlöe Swarbrick, the 26-year-old Green party wunderkind who is Benee’s local MP. “Guts [gutted] if you voted different,” she said with a shrug. The crowd gave little indication that they had. She counts on her fans to share her beliefs. “What I say is for people in the crowd, it’s not for anyone at home,” she says. “There’s something comforting when I’m at a gig. I feel like I can say anything because these people … we’re here for each other, you know?”