Bodega have dropped a new single, ‘City Is Taken’, which will appear on their third LP Our Brand Could Be Yr Life – out April 12 on Chrysalis. Following last month’s ‘Tarkovski’, the track comes paired with a video directed by Luca Balser. Check it out below.
“‘City Is Taken’ a song about my experience of moving to NYC in 2010,” the band’s Nikki Belfiglio said in a statement. “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.”
Ben Hozie added of the video: “It starts in front of what was Goodbye Blue Monday, where I played my first show in the city way back in 2009. 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’ happened 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 plus 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’.”
