Bodega - Endless Scroll

Bandcamp Daily

On their debut, the group tackles the perils of our constantly-connected society.

The Guardian 80

(What’s Your Rupture?)

Named after the corner shops that feed New York, Bodega were one of the toasts of last spring’s SXSW music festival, and rightly so. Wedding ramshackle rant-punk to deadpan, slackerish tunes is a positively Jurassic move for a new band. But this five-piece nail the absurdity of contemporary life with that surprisingly evergreen formula.

Like an LCD Soundsystem that never went clubbing, or a Parquet Courts whose eyebrows arch vertiginously high, this debut finds Bodega veering between satire and indignation. “This machine you know it don’t kill fascists,” sings Ben Hozie on How Did This Happen?! “This machine you know is just a guitar.”

The Guardian 60

(What’s Your Rupture?)

Brooklyn’s Bodega were hailed as “New York’s most exciting band” (by the NME) following a much talked-about appearance at this year’s SXSW. Although singer/guitarist Ben Hozie and pals had something of a false start as the short-lived agit-pranksters Bodega Bay, the revamped band have certainly blazed out from the traps. Debut single How Did This Happen?!, which kickstarts this debut album, is a jerkily propulsive mission statement on “the guilt of the cultural consumer”, replete with searing one-liners. In one, the protagonist “smugly walks” past a political demonstration, while thinking about the “half-off sale at Barnes & Noble”.

Although he is more sardonic than sarcastic, there is something of a New York Mark E Smith about the way Hozie uses mockery (and self-mockery) to ponder modern life’s absurdities and insanities, from learned male behaviour and hipster bands to expensive smoothies. He argues that the internet has made us masters and slaves of our own detached universes, where algorithms know us better than our friends. Thus, “staring at computers” has made us “miserable now”.