Brooklyn indie rockers BODEGA have announced details of their hotly-anticipated third album Our Brand Could Be Yr Life, and shared its lead single “Tarkovski”. Scroll down to watch the video.
The LP will be released on April 12, and is described by the band as a “full remake” of the sole album recorded by guitarist/vocalist Ben Hozie and vocalist Nikki Belfiglio’s former band Bodega Bay in 2015.
That 33-track self-released record, described by Hozie as “aggressively lo-fi” and “like a lush Brian Wilson epic but recorded through a scrappy MacBook mic,” has been reworked into a tight 15-track package of electric, driving indie pop rock, with single “Tarkovski” possessed of an especially catchy chorus.
Hozie, who also moonlights as a filmmaker, says the process of making Our Brand Could Be Yr Life was “like a director remaking one of their old films, like when Hitchcock remade The Man Who Knew Too Much, or when Yasujirō Ozu re-did The Story of Floating Weeds. When you're older and better at your craft, you can revisit the same material but do different things with it.”
Since their 2018 debut, Endless Scroll – described by the Guardian as “riot grrrl rant meets deadpan satire” and the NME as “bolshy art-punks bringing sexy back” – BODEGA’s melding of punk sensibilities and lyrics packed with literary and cinematic references has seen the band build up something of a fanatical cult following.
Hozie and Belfiglio have now been joined by lead guitarist Dan Ryan, bassist Adam See and drummer Adam Shumski and, judging by “Tarkovski” at least, have developed a more commercially-friendly sound, while retaining the lo-fi principles of their earlier work.
The album’s name is taken from Michael Azerrad’s influential 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life, which chronicled the American underground rock scene of the 1980s and ‘90s, focusing on bands like Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Dinosaur Jr., Mudhoney and Fugazi.
Talking about Our Brand Could Be Yr Life, Hozier says: “It’s got dance-punk. There's some shoegaze on there. There's slacker rock on there. There's psychedelic rock on there. R.E.M., too. We wanted to be another band in a long stream of missionaries, proselytizing a certain type of rock subculture.
“We simultaneously mock and celebrate the rock cannon, hoping to redeem its fall from grace, like foolish missionaries who inherited a stained formal tradition that needs to change in order to become meaningful again.”
BODEGA combine punk sensibilities with lyrics packed with literary and cinematic references.
“Tarkovski” was debuted on Steve Lamacq’s new BBC 6 Music show and is described by Hozie as “a pun on the famous Russian director [Andrei Tarkovsky] and skiing; I found that many of his professed rules and guidelines for filmmaking were broken by his own filmmaking practices. Theory never really gets at what you want and applying theory to the chaotic practice of art making (while still useful and essential) is like skiing down a wild slope."
The single is accompanied by a visually arresting music video, directed by Luca Balser and starring Belfiglio’s mother. Typically for the band, it references the climactic candle-carrying sequence in Tarkovsky’s 1983 feature-length film Nostalghia while also managing to look like a straight-up guitar-bass-drums good time. Click to watch it below.
