BODEGA have returned with a new single entitled “City Is Taken,” set to be featured on their new album Our Brand Could Be Yr Life, out April 12 via Chrysalis Records. The charming track features a shuffling drum groove, dizzying post-punk guitar licks, and a tongue-in-cheek vocal performance from Nikki Belfiglio, who addresses New York City’s ever-changing landscape. “‘City Is Taken’ is a song about my experience of moving to NYC in 2010,” Belfiglio reflects. “I came to view myself and my artistic role models as a force of gentrification caught in the invisible web on profiteering that follows artists wherever they go. My visual presence became an unwitting symbol of destruction; the antithesis of everything I sought to create.”
The new track arrives with a DIY music video directed by Luca Balser, which co-main songwriter Ben Hozie introduces: “The video is a study in personal geography/archaeology. It features Nikki and I performing the track throughout a nocturnal NYC in front of defunct venues from the city’s storied musical past alongside Chase banks and Chipotles. The camera frames key DIY spots in BODEGA’s history such as Party Expo, Palisades (where the release party for the original Our Brand Could Be Your Life was in 2015), Silent Barn II, Sunnyvale (where the Endless Scroll release party was), Shea Stadium, Death by Audio, 285 Kent, Glasslands, Monster Island, Aviv, and Cake Shop. There are also some classic punk spots from before our time such as Mercer Arts Center, Palladium, Tier 3, Mudd Club, and Max’s Kansas City (the track references Patti Smith’s recent dictum that young NYC artists should ‘pack [their] bags and move to Detroit’).”
The forthcoming album is a partial rework of original material BODEGA’s Hozie and Belfiglio recorded in their apartment on a laptop under the name BODEGA BAY eight years ago. The new project is updated with a handful of newly written songs and a near decade of experience. Check out the video below, pre-order Our Brand Could Be Yr Life here, and view the group’s tour dates here.
