Bodywash - I Held the Shape While I Could (2023)

There are many places like home. On I Held the Shape While I Could, the sophomore record from Montreal duo Bodywash, home is a mutable thing; a location that is fixed until it isn’t. Over the album’s twelve tracks, Chris Steward and Rosie Long Decter reflect on their separate and shared experiences of losing a sense of place, the way something once solid can slip between your fingers, and their attempts to build something new from the fallout.

Steward and Long Decter met in college in 2014, but didn’t immediately share a musical language. Chris grew up in London listening to British dream pop and classic shoegaze; Rosie was raised in Toronto on folk and Canadiana. Fitting, then, that they first bonded over Alvvays, a dream pop band with a Canadian folk pedigree. Working toward their own blend of airy vocals, intricate guitar work and atmospheric synths, they released their debut EP as Bodywash in 2016 and their first full-length, Comforter, in 2019.

As they prepared to release Comforter, Long Decter and Steward both experienced alienating shifts in their personal lives, leading to a mutual sense of dislocation. They began writing new material that was darker, more experimental, and at the same time more invigorating than the soothing dream pop on Comforter. In 2021 they took these songs into the studio, sharing them with longtime drummer Ryan White and recording and mixing engineer Jace Lasek (Besnard Lakes). The result is a record that lives in the sonics of decay and renewal: breaks that burst forth from a squall of fuzz guitars, drones that glitch and stutter like ice willing itself to thaw.

On “Massif Central,” stark guitars and relentless drums accompany Steward’s whispered vocals as he recounts an experience of bureaucratic purgatory: a typo in a government letter that caused him to lose his legal work status in Canada. Ear-splitter “Perfect Blue” is a psychedelic meditation on Steward’s Japanese and British cultural identity. Satoshi Kon’s 1997 psychological thriller becomes a prism through which Steward projects and refracts his mixed lineage into a murky duality. A pulsating synth motif arches and folds inwards on itself as Steward sings: “to be half is to not be whole.”

Out of this cacophony emerges the propulsive “Kind of Light,” which finds Long Decter contemplating the loss of trust in a partner and working towards a new state of being. Underwater organs and a syncopated kick erupt into an electric catharsis, suggesting that loss can also be a source of energy. Isolation, too, can lead to the formation of communities —out of necessity, or care, or a vision for a different kind of future. While Long Decter and Steward were spinning out, they learned to find support in unexpected places and especially came to rely on each other, deepening their emotional and musical connection. “Ascents” is an ode to that relationship, a soaring expression of gratitude for nights spent on the road together.

Across the record, Steward’s abstract guitars and Long Decter’s cascading vocals act as ambient throughlines, blurring the digital and organic, gesturing toward something intangible, just out of reach. Long Decter began developing her layered vocal approach in the summer of 2018, after smoking some weed and reading a profile of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. She recorded a chorus of loops and emailed them to Steward, who sent back a WeTransfer link with a simple message:

"sitting in a cafe in berlin with a big smile on my face because i know transatlantic collaboration is real

pls listen with headphones"

The attached file became I Held the Shape’s enigmatic opener “In As Far” and marked the beginning of a new era for Bodywash, defined by a shared exploration of experimental textures and an intentional effort to fuse each other’s strengths into a new whole. Steward’s chopped breakbeats and warped soundscapes uplift Long Decter’s imagistic lyricism to create an album that is simultaneously delicate and explosive, despairing and hopeful. Home is a process—the back and forth of guitar riffs and vocal hums, of files sent and received across the ocean. A world imagined and sculpted together.