A song is a song until it isn’t, until it’s pushed to its limits and beyond to become harder, faster and more dissonant. The music on Oneida’s 17th full-length album, Expensive Air (Joyful Noise Recordings), all started as tightly structured, melodic rock songs—very much in line with the non-stop bangers of Success from 2022—but along the way, they changed. Today the band shares the video for its “Reason To Hide.”

Bobby Matador sketched the structures of these songs from his home base in Boston, then sent the demos to Oneida’s New York contingent: Kid Millions, Hanoi Jane, Shahin Motia and Barry London. “We were working out the songs in New York without Bobby. We would start out riding the riffs, and then Shahin and Jane would add wild, out-of-key guitar harmonies,” said Kid Millions. “It seemed so perfect.”

Oneida recorded Expensive Air in three sessions scattered across 2023, convening at Colin Marston’s Menegroth The Thousand Caves studio in Woodhaven, Queens, whenever they had a few songs ready. Marston and the band mixed the album in February 2024 at Menegroth.

The new album expands on what Oneida achieved with Success, but also pushes past it, laying down irresistible song structures and then blowing them to psychedelic bits. “I found myself thinking about this record as a darker, looser, louder, counterpart to Success,” Bobby explains. “Both records charge forward from the jump and mix the elliptical with the blunt, and longing with self-mockery. But Success is like laughing in a car gunning carelessly through an ice storm, and Expensive Air is how you laugh at yourself as the car spins into the ditch, or a tree. Same trip, but a little closer to the bone.”