Bodega: All Inside Aquarium drops the indie modifier

All Inside Aquarium makes its case at volume. Bodega's fourth album, out October 9, has technical guitar solos with open-hearted lyrics in front of them, and it does not apologise for either. It is the first of their records where all five of them sound like they agreed on something.

Bodega came out of New York in the 2010s, formed in what Hozie calls a very organic way. The Fall was the working model on the early records, which is where the debt shows most. The Stone Roses were named as an inspiration before this one, and his own list for this album starts with '90s alternative rock and Jane's Addiction. Across Endless Scroll (2018), Broken Equipment (2022) and Our Brand Could Be Yr Life (2024), the band kept a conceptual gap between themselves and the songs. "I never thought of us as a post-punk band," he says. "I just thought of us as a conceptual rock band."

They made this one in Leeds, their first time recording outside New York, at producer Matt Peel's studio the Nave, a deconsecrated church. All five members lived together there for the run. They wrote the songs back home and tracked them across two long sessions, one in the dead of winter and one at the peak of summer: the most euphoric material cut in the cold, the introspective drones and ballads cut in the heat. Theo Verney mixed it, Felix Davis mastered it, Nikki Belfiglio designed it, and Chrysalis released it. The title track also went out on a 7-inch with "Since You Ask" on the flip.

Hozie's phrase for the result is "proper rock without the 'indie' modifier", and the modifier is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Melody comes first here. The lyrics stay open, and a solo arrives as written material rather than texture. "The first rock music I really fell in love with was '90s alternative rock, especially Jane's Addiction," he says. "I wanted to make music that would make me feel the magic conjured by Jane's and other bands from their era, when punk ideology was exploding into a more psychedelic and spiritual type of sound world."

The psychological writing runs through it. "Weather Me" is about a mind scrambled by information overload, and "Pick Up The Check" is about learning how to think your own thoughts, which is a harder subject to build a hook on than it sounds. Then there is "Literary World", which Hozie describes as one of the most didactic songs in their repertoire. He is not being modest.

The title track is the melodic one, and he calls it the band's attempt at an existential anthem. "Combustible" and "Backbeaten" are a pair of portraits, both of bitter rock and roll lifers who have nowhere to put their yearning. His favourite, and mine, is "Astro Night Ride": a song about death and whatever gets learned from beyond it, arranged like a roller coaster, with a slow opening that works as the chain lift before the band speeds up, descends, changes key, palette and tempo, and floats out of the woods on the comedown brake run. "Olivia" covers the same ground, which gives death two songs on this record.

It is for anyone who keeps Gang of Four or Delta 5 within reach, and for anyone who likes the dryness of a band like English Teacher but wants a lead break in the middle of it. It asks you to take a guitar solo seriously as an emotional move, which is a real ask in 2026. If your taste runs to the cooler end of post-punk, this will read as too loud and too sincere.

What does not work is the lecturing. "Literary World" is the clear case, and the record's wider problem is with endings. Hozie's own framing is an explosion of political consciousness with very few solutions attached, and a couple of these songs diagnose without landing. With this much melody lying around, you notice the exact moment a song turns into a position.

Since Endless Scroll, Bodega have been clever about rock. All Inside Aquarium is the record where clever stops being the defence. Four out of five. Start with the roller coaster.

Hear it