Montréal-based JOVM mainstays Bodywash — Chris Steward and Rosie Long Dector — can trace their origins back to when the pair met while attending McGill University. But when they met, the pair didn’t immediately share a common musical language: Steward grew up in London listening to celestial dream pop while Dector grew up in Toronto listening to folk and Canadiana. The music they began writing together saw the pair bridging their influences. With the release of 2016’s self-titled EP and 2019’s full-length debut, Comforter, the Montréal-based duo firmly established their sound — slow-burning and dreamy material centered around ethereal vocals, intricate guitar lines and pulsating synths. 

The Canadian shoegazers’ sophomore album I Held the Shape While I Could is slated for a Friday release through Light Organ Records. When touring to support Comforter was cut short by the pandemic, the duo used the unexpected hiatus to write new material, which was darker, more experimental and more invigorating than its predecessor. The new material also manages to reflect on Steward’s and Long Dector’s 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 psychological and emotional fallout. 

Over the past handful of months I’ve managed to write about the forthcoming album’s first three singles: 

“Kind of Light.” the sophomore album’s expansive first single. Beginning with a slow-burning and elegiac intro featuring glistening organ and a skittering yet propulsive kick pattern that slow builds up and breaks into a high energy boom bap-like breakbeat paired with scorching guitar squealing and wobbling bass synths. Long Decter’s ethereal and achingly plaintive vocals expressing profound, heart-wrenching despair — and hope. The song suggests that while loss is natural and sadly expected there can be hope; that there are only a handful of things in our lives that are truly permanent. And that ultimately for the most part, it can get better. 

“I wrote ‘Kind of Light’ in bed,” Long Decter says. ““It was the fall of 2018 and Chris and I were both going through experiences of learning not to trust what feels like home. He sent me a plugin for a new organ sound, suggesting it might provide inspiration. I sent him back chords, a kick pattern, and some vocals about trying to pull your legs back; trying to take your energy out of the wreckage and put it into yourself. The process of deciding what’s worth keeping, what can be reworked and what gets tossed in the fire. A process that is devastating and also weirdly invigorating, because you can see new possibilities opening up in front of you. And you can start to look for light somewhere else.”

“Massif Central” a woozy track that features glistening synth bursts, shimmering and angular post punk-meets-shoegaeze-like textures paired with a relentless motorik groove, stormy guitar feedback and Steward’s ethereal whispers recounting an experience of Kafka-esque, bureaucratic purgatory: a typo in a government letter caused Steward to lose his legal work status in Canada. The song manages to evoke the sensation of having your life flipped upside down, then being hopelessly stuck and having no say or agency in your situation. 

“After eight years living in Canada, in the Spring of 2021, a government clerical error caused me to lose my legal status here,” Steward explains. “As a UK national, I lost my right to work. My savings trickled away during months where I could do little but pace the corners of my apartment. I was prepared to pack my bags and leave as the life I’d hoped to construct for myself seemed to vanish into a bureaucratic abyss.”
 
“‘Massif’ is the sound of wailing into a cliff and not knowing if you’ll hear an echo,” continued Steward. “The spoken word is inspired by a squirrel that was trapped in the wall behind my bed, clawing its way to salvation. With the help of friends, family, music, and a few immigration lawyers (and the rest of my savings), I’m now a permanent resident here. But this song remains as testament to my experience with an exploitative institution.”

“No Repair” is a slow-burning and melancholy ballad featuring strummed acoustic guitar, Long Dector’s achingly tender, bruised delivery, Country Western-tinged percussion by Ryan White, atmospheric synths and swelling bursts of lap steel by Micah Flavin. The end result is a song that’s a gorgeous mix of classic country and brooding shoegaze rooted in the lived-in, confusing experience of heartbreaking loss — in particular, the lingering ghosts despite their newfound absence. 

“In my early 20s I found myself in a disastrous love triangle,” Long Dector explains. “It was a mess of bad decisions and repressed queer longing and those things you chase because you hope they will prove you are real. I found myself writing repetitively about light and air and the absence of tactility. ‘No Repair’ came from the decision to let all that go…”

I Held the Shape While I Could‘s fourth and latest single “Perfect Blue” is arguably the most My Bloody Valentine-like song of the entire album. Built around bursts of fluttering synths, buzzing power chords and paired with a chugging motorik groove and Steward’s aching falsetto, “Perfect Blue” is a tumultuous storm, evoking the churn and wooziness of a deeply internalized conflict; the sort held by those who share a part of different cultures and are never fully fit in either.

“‘Perfect Blue’ takes its name and its inspiration from Satoshi Kon’s 1997 animated film,” Bodywash’s Chris Steward explains. “The themes of internal conflict and losing one’s sense of self really resonated with me when I first watched it during the winter of 2021. ‘Perfect Blue’ (the song) is an exploration of the many facets of my own cultural identity. Being both British and Japanese has often felt like a compromise. While it might be easy to romanticize this duality, the reality is that it’s impossible to wholly belong to either culture. What has brought me some solace in the past is their shared appreciation for shoegaze and ‘Perfect Blue’ is an ode to this common cultural heritage. We stacked breathy digital synths (inspired by Masahiro Ikumi’s ominous soundtrack) atop a wave of viscous fuzz guitars, in search of a “perfect blue” – a color the shade of renewal.”