At a booth in Soho Diner, Bennett Coast is talking about control, or rather, the need to let go of it. “It always feels pretty annihilating to create something and then share that,” he says. “It’s embarrassing.” He’s not so much being self-deprecating, he’s being honest about the fragile space between creation and exposure. “You have to be able to throw shit at the wall,” he continues.

That willingness to stumble, especially publicly, is what gives Coast’s work an energy that feels unmistakably real. The LA-based artist, who first started out filming neighborhood skits on a flip camera, approaches creativity as a practice of vulnerability. For him, making music and film are both ways of learning how to loosen his grip on perfection and leave room for accident and play. “As I’ve gotten older,” he says, “I’ve just realized the importance of exposure to things that are uncomfortable and not trying to be so precious about everything.”

In a culture obsessed with polish, Coast’s openness feels quietly radical. His visuals often resist the neat emotional cues that dominate mainstream pop. Instead, his videos pair incongruent images and sounds, like blue paint pouring over a vintage Mac tower in slow motion. “It works because it doesn’t,” he laughs. “Everything doesn’t have to make sense. The only priority is emotional.”

Coast’s creative process sits somewhere between meditation and mischief. Whether he’s syncing a song to a YouTube edit of Garden State or recording vocals late at night with friends, he’s constantly looking for the moment when something imperfect suddenly feels alive. “When I’m making music, I’m chasing any emotion,” he says. “Not even a sad or happy one, just something that stabs your stomach. Whenever I’ve tried to control what the emotion is, it comes off as fake.”

The result is work that’s deeply personal but rarely self-serious. “It always feels annihilating,” he repeats. “And sometimes it’s selfaggrandizing, because someone likes it and you feel good about yourself. But either way, it’s vulnerable.”

The word ‘vulnerable’ comes up often when Coast talks, though he doesn’t use it sentimentally. For him, it’s a discipline. It means showing up unguarded, whether that’s singing live without autotune or expressing to his friends his feelings of failure. “I’ve been practicing being intensely vulnerable,” he says. “When everything in my body tells me to uphold my ego or my idea of stature, I try to go the other way. To just explain what I’m feeling and let people hold that.”

Part of Coast’s current journey is learning to share the creative space with others. After years of editing every frame and designing every flyer himself, he’s begun letting collaborators into the process. “It’s scary because you have to trust people to understand you,” he admits. “But that’s also how you feel connected. Doing everything alone started to feel slow and sad. You have to let things be and go how they go.”

It’s that act of surrender, creatively and emotionally, that seems to define Coast’s latest work. His new EP, Fashion for the Morning, comes with a self-designed card game called Last Minute Mourners, a social deception game about hired guests at a funeral. The concept is absurd, but in the best way. It’s playful, morbid, and deeply human. “It’s just fun,” he shrugs. “Everything doesn’t have to be that deep.”

For Coast, that’s what being an artist ultimately means; staying porous to the world, even when it hurts. It’s less about chasing perfection and more about staying curious. It's about leaving space for the offbeat, the imperfect, the raw. “If I really let the thought of messing up fester,” he says, “I’d never put out music again. So you just have to do it. Let it be messy. Let it be yours.”