Bodega

Bodega, an art-damaged Brooklyn outfit, set out to stir reflection even as audiences danced, an intent clear on their abrasive 2018 debut Endless Scroll, whose dance-punk framework rested on shouted vocals, weighty ideas, and restless rhythms. Later projects such as the 2019 Shiny New Model EP and 2022’s Broken Equipment softened some sonic abrasion yet left the words pointed and the grooves buoyant. Their 2024 leap to a major label yielded Our Brand Could Be Yr Life, the band’s most concise and tuneful statement to date.

The group took shape after guitarist/vocalist Ben Hozie and vocalist Nikki Belfiglio downsized their earlier project Bodega Bay, trimming the name and revising the roster. That band had formed in 2013, issued Our Brand Could Be Yr Life in 2015—an album tracked solely on GarageBand’s internal microphone—and dissolved the following year. Retaining the spiky post-punk drive and sardonic anti-consumerist outlook of the prior incarnation, Hozie and Belfiglio performed across New York and farther afield, sharing bills with Protomartyr and La Luz among others.

With new songs in hand—several written only weeks earlier as Bodega Bay unraveled—the duo entered the studio for the band’s first album. Parquet Courts’ Austin Brown oversaw sessions on the Tascam 388 tape machine his own group had used for Light Up Gold, shaping the resulting shouty yet melodic post-post-punk tracks into Endless Scroll, released on What’s Yr Rupture? in July 2018. While promoting the record, Bodega headlined U.S. dates for the first time and also played U.K. shows, two of which supplied the live album Witness Scroll recorded in Glasgow and London. The tighter Shiny New Model EP followed in late 2019.

After that release, Hozie and Belfiglio turned to filmmaking and completed 2020’s PVT CHAT, only to shelve further projects when COVID-19 restrictions took hold. They refocused on the band, now completed by bassist Adam See, drummer Tae Lee, and lead guitarist Dan Ryan, and began writing material sparked by their book-club readings of various philosophers together with frustrations over advertising, gentrification, and enforced positivity. Produced by Hozie with assistance from live-sound mixer Bobby Lewis, Broken Equipment paired the group’s witty, forceful lyrics with sparkling, modern new-wave arrangements. After touring, the 2023 Xtra Equipment EP collected outtakes from those sessions. With Adam Shumski replacing Lee on drums, the band signed to Chrysalis Records and recorded its third album, Our Brand Could Be Yr Life, built from songs Hozie and Belfiglio had started nearly a decade earlier along with newer pieces—all sharp critiques of contemporary life housed in danceable, punchy indie rock. A lengthy world tour began soon after the album’s April release.