Montréal-based JOVM mainstays Bodywash — Chris Steward and Rosie Long Decter — will be releasing their third album, Laughing at Noise on November 20, 2026 through Light Organ. The album reportedly finds the duo taking stock of the ambivalent feelings that have gathered behind them over the past decade of their professional music careers: Steward and Long Decter, who started playing together in a dorm room practice space while at university are now in their early 30s. And in that time, the city that nurtured their creative expressive has become a decidedly harsher place. Rents rise as abounded properties known locally as brownfields are transformed into new developments and pricey real estate; DIY spaces wither in structural shadow; summer is hazier and heavier.
Laughing at Noise doesn’t indulge in nostalgia or cynicism — rather, it sees the duo sorting through what it means to grow older and keep on with both wariness and wisdom 2023’s I Held The Shape While I Could was swirling, elegant and elastic, but as they began writing new material, the duo found themselves pulled towards a more stripped-back approach. Steward was enamored with acoustic guitar and Long Decor was writing on guitar and bass rather than on keys.
The songs that would eventually comprise their third album are much more playful and worn-in, and the overall sound of the album follows. It’s a bit rougher around the edges, seeing the JOVM mainstays trading an adherence to fidelity for a looser, nosier sound that gradually developed over months of experimentation.
The duo produced the album over the course of a year at Autoland Audio in Montréal’s Parc-Ex neighborhood and enlisted Asher Gould-Murtagh for mixing duties. Sonically, the album further cements their unique blend of shoegaze and dream pop but with a scrappier 80s indie rock sensibility in tone and point of view, seemingly nodding at the likes of Elliott Smith and Kim Gordon, complete with a dialing up of distortion and fuzziness.
But the album is rooted in a Montréal perspective — a point of view, along with its melodic sensibilities that buoys it all from being overly world-weary. Long Decter says that she might call Laughing at Noise, the band’s “Montréal album.” The album embodies the perceptive on home that can only come with time. Steward adds, ” “The longer you stay somewhere, the more you become the yardstick against which everything is measured.”
Laughing at Noise’s first single “Lapsang” is a seamless — and downright effortless — blend of dream pop, indie folk and 90s alt rock featuring swirling synths, strummed acoustic, glitchy feedback beneath Steward’s dreamy delivery and their uncanny melodic and harmonic sensibility. At one point Steward sings “I took the bus down the bike lane” — a snow globe-like image of the city’s uniquely charming and unruly frustrations — before reflecting “I’ve lived around here for a long time.”
Steward explainss, “‘Lapsang’ is an ode to Montreal’s Little Italy neighborhood and the years I spent there, waiting for the 55 bus. It’s named after my favourite, impossibly smokey blend of tea, which has the most sing-song of names: Lapsang Souchong. The riff and verse were written during an ice storm, where the resulting power outage forced me to write most of the song without a computer. The frozen tree tendrils looked a lot like the leaves of the tea I was brewing, prompting a working title that would never be changed. Later, Rosie and I would record separate melodies for the chorus in the studio, only to realise they could be woven together seamlessly.”
Directed by Evangelos Desborough, the accompanying video for “Lapsung” follows an Elvis impersonator as he amps himself for a gig at a community center/VFW. But throughout the gig, he seems woefully out of place with the guests not paying much attention to him. We then see the Elvis impersonator on the Montréal Métro, walking home and lost in his own melancholy. Some of the locations are familiar, including one that looks like Rue Sherbrooke near I think Rue St. Denis.
