Bodega Left New York Behind — Recording Album Four Inside a Leeds Church
Out today, *All Inside Aquarium* marks Bodega's first album made away from home turf. Frontman Ben Hozie opens up about outgrowing the "post-punk" tag, a dream visit from his late mother, and where he stands on the Geese controversy.
New York band Bodega's fourth full-length album, *All Inside Aquarium*, officially dropped today (October 9), about a year after 2024's *Our Brand Could Be Yr Life*. This time, they left their familiar New York turf behind, recording the entire album in Leeds, England for the first time — at The Nave, a studio converted from a disused church, with producer Matt Peel at the helm.
In an interview with NME, frontman Ben Hozie made clear he's done with the "post-punk" label. "I never thought of us as a post-punk band," he said. "I've always thought of us as a conceptual rock band." On this album, he says he was going for "unadorned, straight-up rock" without indie polish — deliberately pairing open-ended lyrics with technical guitar solos, a combination that's somewhat out of fashion in music right now. He also didn't hold back on calling out "indie" as, in some ways, a class label in disguise: "The gap between Sonic Youth and KoRn is actually much smaller than people think — one gets treated like MoMA-worthy avant-garde art, the other gets dismissed as middlebrow anti-intellectualism, but both bands' music hits me directly."
Hozie describes the title track "All Inside Aquarium" as the band's "attempt at existentialism," with melody lines more pronounced than before. He says one of the album's core goals was bringing back a kind of melodicism in rock that could actually compete with mainstream charts again — "that doesn't mean a band has to water down its avant-garde ideas. Popular shouldn't have to mean shallow or unexplored."
The recording process itself produced an unexpected time-lag effect. The band wrote all the lyrics and music back in New York before flying to Leeds for two separate recording sessions — one in the dead of winter, one in peak summer. The results came out backwards from what you'd expect: tracks that sound like they should belong to summer, all upbeat and bright, were actually recorded in winter; while the introspective, low-key ballads were finished in summer. Hozie sums it up in one line: "The heart is always longing for something that's already passed, or hasn't arrived yet."
He names "Astro Night Ride" as his favorite track on the album. His mother, who passed away a few years ago, keeps showing up in his dreams — the two of them riding a roller coaster together in a space-station-themed amusement park, screaming and laughing. The song's arrangement is structured to mirror a roller coaster ride: a slow intro simulating the chain lift dragging the car upward, then the band speeds up, shifts key, and changes tone and tempo to mimic the plunge, drifting into the trees afterward, and that moment of relief as the brakes finally ease off after the scare.
Another single, "Literary World," is the most "preachy" song on the album — Hozie's own words. He talks about how this era isn't lacking political awareness, but rather imaginable solutions, and that the language of poets and creators is exactly what opens the door to "another way of existing." He also took the chance to weigh in on the Ed Sheeran and Macklemore controversy, bluntly saying Sheeran's "lyrics full of clichés expose a worldview that only bows to power and capital."
As a Fellow New York Band, What Does Hozie Make of Geese's "Fake" Controversy?
The interview also touched on the recently buzzed-about New York band Geese and the "psyop" accusations swirling around whether their rise was manufactured. Hozie didn't give a direct verdict, instead zooming out: "If disinformation can be used to swing a presidential election, of course it can be used to tank a hot band's reputation too." He thinks a lot of the criticism other bands throw at Geese is really just "jealousy in disguise," and that the real issue worth examining is how tech companies manipulate information at scale to control the public — not whether a band is "authentic enough."
The Leeds experience behind *All Inside Aquarium* also gave Bodega a crash course in British rock — Gang Of Four, Delta 5, and The Mekons are what they consider their self-studied "Leeds art-punk syllabus," while The Stone Roses' self-titled debut and The Fall are what Hozie calls the band's deepest influences. He's also recently mentioned being into English Teacher and Adult DVD.
Bodega will hit Manchester, London, and Leeds on tour next month, with full dates yet to be officially announced.
