There's a nature preserve a mile down the line from my pad I like to go hike in on chilly mornings. Earlier this week I was out there sitting on this perfect rock I found on the edge of the white river, wide and flat, ideal for a good sit, watching some white-tailed deer on the other side getting a drink. I'm sitting there enjoying this beautiful day—clear skies, a crisp fifty degrees, leaves falling, a bottle of absinthe tucked into my coat pocket—when my phone goes off. Obviously, my first instinct was to chuck the fucker in the water, but I restrained myself, and thank god I did, as it turned out the notification was an early access link to the new Dizgo album.
Dizgo is, of course, the funk-jam gem of Bloomington, Indiana, the town famous for its prestigious college, happening music scene, and the primo gel tabs you can buy on every street corner. These guys are the creme of the crop in the Indiana psychedelic rock scene. If you're going to go to a jam band show, Dizgo is the one to attend, hands down. I'm one of many Hoosiers who follow these dudes religiously, so when I got a first look at the new album, it was about as exciting as winning the lottery.
The new record, dubbed "Innerstate," is Dizgo's fourth studio album. Thirteen tracks and an hour and seventeen minutes long, it's a miracle we only had to wait two years after the release of their last album, "Melt," to get this one. We've already gotten a little taste of "Innerstate," with several singles having been released to tease the record, such as "Exit 59," "Orbital," and "Intuition." The album is all about looking inside yourself, addressing who you are, how you relate to others, and ramming a metaphorical car through the embankments of your own psyche. If I may quote the band's own words, "Innerstate" is "about movement, self-discovery, transformation, and interconnectedness. "Hey, that's awesome. We all love a long look in the mirror, especially when we're several grams of mushrooms deep watching our features morph to match those of one of the mutant freaks from that movie, 'The Cave.'" But how is the album?
"Innerstate" is over an hour of groovy funk-rock licks and heart-palpitating jams. Jam bands are notorious for coming up short in the studio; it's a genre that's meant for the live stage. That's just a fact. You will not, however, find that to be the case here. I've seen Dizgo live somewhere between seven and eight hundred times, so I can say with utmost certainty that this record is a perfect representation of a Dizgo live show. It helps to have a Grammy-winning producer like Vance Powell working on the album, but, if anything, "Innerstate" is a testament to the fact that Dizgo is on a level above that of the rest of the jam band scene.
Lock yourself in your basement with some mood lights on and put the record on over a Bluetooth speaker, not any speaker, mind you; it must at minimum be able to rattle your windows, or you're just putzing around, and you can almost imagine what it's like to see the band live. You'll be entranced by a whirlwind of bumping guitars, funky bass lines, pounding drums, and some of the best key tickling you'll find in this hemisphere. "Innerstate" is a trip into your own mind; it's all the thrill and introspection of a heroic dose of ayahuasca without the visions of gyrating rainbow fractals and fields of human skulls. It's a collection of high-impact funk-infused jams which demand to be played at maximum volume, preferably while bathed in neon lights dancing in the broken glass-riddled parking lot of some charred industrial complex, feeling the hooks and riffs reverberate off the crumbling smokestacks.
You can find "Innerstate" streaming wherever you get your music now. I must implore you to give it a listen today. This may just be my favorite release of 2026, and it's not just because we finally have a studio release of my favorite Dizgo song, "Curio," and I didn't even have to sell my soul to get it! So go out and give "Innerstate" a listen today. While you do that, I better get heading back to the pad. I love my rock, but the bottle's empty, and everyone knows you can't enjoy a hike while you're drying out.
