Upset is Dork's go-to playlist for the best new heavy music, where urgent guitars and boundary-pushing bands meet moments that hit hard.
Ben Hozie’s teenage air guitar has finally made it onto a BODEGA record. The New York band’s singer is revisiting his attachment to Jane’s Addiction, whose guitarist once occupied a considerable amount of his spare time. “This record is a love letter to the taste of my 15-year-old self,” he says. “The damaged suburban teenager miming the Dave Navarro solos on ‘Ritual De Lo Habitual’ after school desperately wanted BODEGA to tap into some of that magic.” On ‘All Inside Aquarium’, he has given that teenager a recording budget.
His preferred description is “Butch Vig-core”, after the producer behind Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ and the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Siamese Dream’. He also names the Pumpkins’ ‘Gish’ and Sonic Youth’s ‘Dirty’. Those records helped set the guitar ambitions for the record, although Hozie has some objections to the genre BODEGA supposedly occupied before it. “We’ve often been described as a post-punk band, but we’ve never thought of ourselves that way,” he says. He is considerably less polite about what he hears elsewhere: “Too much art rock is austere, flat, sexless and therefore lacking vitality. Our goal is to reflect the many contours of the human heart. Poetry without humour is false.”
The plan for this album included a change of subject. Hozie considers ‘Endless Scroll’, ‘Broken Equipment’ and ‘Our Brand Could Be Yr Life’, released between 2018 and 2024, a completed trilogy. Their examinations of consumerism and life through a screen gave BODEGA plenty to argue about. “We consciously decided to avoid social critique songwriting and explore more direct personal songwriting,” he says. This is also a band whose new single, ‘Literary World’, takes issue with people telling everybody what to think. Hozie is quite prepared to discuss the discrepancy. Being tired of having opinions, however, is Dork’s suggestion, and receives a firm refusal.
“No. In fact, theory doesn’t always follow practice,” he replies. “‘Literary world’ critiques our overly didactic world, but is itself perhaps didactic. In that sense, it is the thesis song of this record.” He wants room for politics in it, too: “A literary perspective is a cosmic perspective in that through it, all consciousness can be communicated and understood; A literary point of view is fundamentally an empathetic point of view and one that can and should work in conjunction with a political point of view.”
Hozie is writing from Miranda de Ebro, where he reports drinking espresso on tour with percussionist-vocalist Nikki Belfiglio and bandmates Adam Shumski and Tim Race. The actual making of ‘All Inside Aquarium’ took them to Leeds for a month and a half with producer Matt Peel. They recorded together at the Nave, a deconsecrated church, then built up the guitar overdubs; Theo Verney mixed the results in Brighton, both credited as being “vital in helping us get close to that huge 90s sound.”
Belfiglio subsequently made a smaller version of the church. Between October 2025 and February 2026, she constructed an entire miniature world inside a fish tank, with assistance from local artists, incorporating references to the album’s songs. The Nave was among them. Wood and papier-mâché went into the construction; a room big enough for BODEGA and their guitar overdubs now had to fit inside an aquarium.
The tank also supplied the setting for the title track’s video, directed by Belfiglio. A discarded green-screen cloth found near a camera shop provided the means to put the band inside her construction. Her work continues onto alternative album sleeves, which she screen-printed, and the individual artwork accompanying a series of seven-inch singles.
"Too much art rock is austere, flat, sexless"
When Hozie spoke to Dork in 2024, he was already questioning arrangements that left the music relatively static underneath the words, and wanted more scope for melody and chord changes. That year’s ‘Our Brand Could Be Yr Life’ revisited material from Bodega Bay, his and Belfiglio’s earlier band. The original 2015 ‘Our Brand Could Be Your Life’ recordings were made using a Mac’s built-in microphone and GarageBand. Returning to them gave BODEGA a chance to reconsider songs written before ‘Endless Scroll’ established their name.
“The Bodega Bay material is far more melodic than a lot of the talk-singing on the first two BODEGA LPs,” he says. The apparent new direction was already there in the older band. What he wanted to recover went beyond the tunes: “Perhaps the biggest influence from revisiting our earlier naive band was the irreverent sense of trickster play that was essential to Bodega Bay. That certainly influenced the energy of our new disc and our current ethos.”
Last year’s ‘Rot In Helvetica’, released under the name NODEGA, took their melodic songwriting into hardcore, skate punk and thrash. BODEGA’s first three albums make a tidy sequence, provided you leave out the record where they change a letter and try thrash. Hozie won’t accept that omission: “It was not a ‘side project’ but an essential step in the BODEGA journey.”
He is wary of any description that leaves too much of his taste outside the band. R.E.M. and Sonic Youth figure among his favourites, but “indie rock” strikes him as inadequate. Even his preferred description draws an objection before he finishes explaining it. “We tend to prefer the term ‘art rock’,” he says, with the qualification “as limited as that is since all rock is ‘art rock’”.
“We feel spiritually linked to bands like Pink Floyd or Devo, who were conceptual but also pop,” he says. The album’s twelve tracks are intended to accommodate different approaches: “BODEGA is like the Beatles in that we are a song band as opposed to a ‘sound’ band. We treat each song as its own palette as opposed to curating an overall sonic ‘vibe’.” His verdict on current guitar music follows the same preference: “We are excited by the perceived general move towards pop songwriting and away from ‘vibes’ in the rock band idiom.”
How directly the writing addresses private experience is a separate ambition from making the guitars bigger. Hozie says personal address has tended to go into their ballads; he identifies ‘Backbeaten’ and ‘Olivia’, the two songs that close the new album, among his attempts at something more open-hearted. His explanation here stays with the writing rather than the experiences behind it. “We think of our songwriting as fundamentally philosophical; this time, we sought truth in psychology as opposed to sociology.”
"Rock culture is worse off when bands choose not to put covers on their LPs"
Bob Dylan makes the proposed departure from social critique harder still. BODEGA have chosen ‘Slow Train’, from his 1979 album ‘Slow Train Coming’, for track eight. In Dylan’s original, anger at religious hypocrisy sits alongside disgust at food being stored while people go hungry. Hozie and Belfiglio have chosen it from Dylan’s Christian period, and their admiration is emphatic. “Me and Nik are massive fans of Bob’s underrated ‘gospel’ era and think his ‘Slow Train’ lyrics are some of his very best.”
“Our ‘cover’ doesn’t sound anything like his version but honours the spirit of the text,” he says. He doesn’t specify which parts of the text matter most to their version. The choice nevertheless makes ‘Literary World’ harder to treat as a simple instruction to retire the arguments: BODEGA have invited another exceptionally argumentative songwriter onto the record. Hozie’s broader account of Dylan’s importance allows little room for opting out: “All songwriters have to deal with Dylan at some point just as all playwrights have to deal with Shakespeare and all filmmakers Hitchcock.”
He traces the influence through BODEGA’s repeated refrains, naming ‘Fear Not the Fear’ and ‘All Past Lovers’ among the examples. Dylan also gets credit for “his injection of poetics into trad rock and roll”, immediately qualified with “although Chuck Berry did it before Bob”. Hozie thinks more bands should make room for other people’s songs. “We also are passionate defenders of covers and think rock culture is worse off when bands chose not to put covers on their LPs or in their shows,” he says. “An anti-covers philosophy betrays a tendency towards musical solipsism.”
The seven inches give them somewhere further to put their own songs. Each has a non-album B-side; the title track comes with ‘Since You Ask’. “All of our favourite bands, from the Beatles to the Smiths and Pavement, made B-sides an essential part of their creative practice. They allow a band to be prolific without overloading LPs,” Hozie says. “Since our second LP, we’ve made a point to have every single come out with a B-side, even if only digital. This is the first time we’ve done proper 7 inches and hope that people enjoy the world-building.”
“We certainly don’t think of the B-sides as lesser tracks than any of the album cuts,” he adds. His test for a release puts him back in the audience: “I always think, ‘What would my favourite band do?’ when deciding how to approach a release.” “For better or worse, there is a connection that happens when you fall in love with a deep cut that simply doesn’t happen when you swoon over a single.”
BODEGA’s album ‘All Inside Aquarium’ is out 9th October. They play London’s 100 Club on 15th September and tour the UK in November.
