Bodywash have never been a band in a hurry. The Montreal duo of Rosie Long Decter and Chris Steward met in university, earned early attention in the local scene with a self-titled EP, sharpened their sound on 2019’s Comforter, then went darker and stranger on 2023’s I Held the Shape While I Could. Now they return with “Come and Go”, out via Light Organ Records, a single that trades the dense fog of their last record for something leaner, brighter and more direct.
The band’s origin story starts with a shared obsession. “The first band we really bonded over was Alvvays, even before 2016, when we were just starting university,” says Rosie. “I remember Chris messaging me about this new Canadian indie band that only had two singles out, and I had seen them open for Said The Whale earlier that year. I think that debut album, with all of its perfect pop melancholy, came along at the right time for both of us.”
Their individual roots run in different directions, Chris toward UK dream pop, Rosie toward folk and Canadiana, and those touchstones still surface in the writing. “For me there’s always going to be some Joni Mitchell Blue in there,” she says. “Her wordplay and storytelling on that album in particular was so foundational for me. Chris says it’s probably Dummy by Portishead for him.”
Bodywash tend to collect genre tags, dream pop, shoegaze, trip-hop, but the duo think in less tidy terms when they’re actually working. “I think on our last album we really leaned into dense textures: ambient vocal layers, walls of fuzz guitars and organ,” the band says. “On our upcoming work we’re more interested in dynamic shifts and the relationship between space and density, sparser arrangements that make the heavier moments really stick out.”
That evolution has been gradual. Chris traces a line from the EP through Comforter: “I think we grew more comfortable with taking risks during the Comforter era. The self-titled EP was about trying to establish an identity as a band without a clear idea of what that sounded like. Comforter let us dial in that sound a bit more while also experimenting with instrumentation and structure, given we worked on it over many years.”
I Held the Shape While I Could pushed further into instability and the shifting meaning of home, themes that came directly from the duo’s lives. “Chris had left Montreal for a period and then came back and faced some immigration issues with his work permit in particular, so that was an experience that influenced the song ‘Massif Central’ especially,” Rosie explains. “And for me I had gone through an experience of having lost trust in a personal relationship that was really destabilizing, so I think there’s a heaviness and darkness that translated into the sounds on that record.”
“Come and Go” is a deliberate pivot away from that weight. “I think we wanted to shake off a bit of the darkness and be more playful this time around, and a bit looser; not overthinking or over-editing,” they say.
The song also marks a shift in how the two write together. “I wrote ‘Come and Go’ mostly in one go at home, improvising on vocal and bass, and then I brought it to Chris, playing it for him on guitar in the studio,” Rosie says. “Normally, I write on keys and make a demo, and he helps flesh it out, or vice versa. But after our last album, we wanted to try writing more in the room together. As we played through the song together, and Chris wrote the riff, it came together really quickly in a shared burst of energy that’s only really possible in-person.”
Rosie breaks down that handoff in more detail: “The first pass had the core melody and chords and a lot of the lyrics, improvised over bass, and then with Chris we worked out the structure and the second half of it took on this noisier timbre. Chris also added what he called a “grunge chord” to the second half which really gave it a different flavour.”
The duo’s collaborative instincts have always been fluid. “We’ve always found it quite easy trading leads for different songs or sections. Usually one of us comes up with the bones of a song, and the other can complement what’s there already, or take it in a new direction,” the band explains. “With our upcoming material though we tried to be less perfectionist. I think we did end up being more ruthless on the cutting room floor. While there’s still heavy multi-track dubbing going on, we were a bit more selective, and would usually be more critical about where a sonic element really served the song.”
Lyrically, “Come and Go” is rooted firmly in the city the band calls home. “The song itself is really influenced by the built environment of Montreal: the forty auto route, the new buildings popping up around the University de Montreal campus, this crazy animal-themed light show in Laval,” Rosie says. “It describes scenes I’ve shared with my girlfriend and my bandmates here, and the sort of temporary or transitory feeling that comes with living as an artist in Montreal, or anywhere really; the sense that there could always be an end date on the horizon.”
That specificity is new territory for Bodywash, whose atmospherics have historically resisted geography. “I’ve always been a very place-based writer, in prose as well, which is funny because it hasn’t shown up in Bodywash much until now, aside from maybe ‘One Day Clear’ on our last album,” Rosie says. “I think that’s because our sound was always so dreamy and atmospheric, not as grounded. But with a more stripped-back sound, there’s more room for storytelling and description, where you’re trying to convey how it feels, lyrically and sonically, to live in your city and how that environment shapes your own internal world. There’s more literal ways of doing that, like field recordings, but I think on this song we’ve used fuzz and noise and prettier acoustic sounds as well to build an emotional world that corresponds with the real one, if that makes sense.”
Even in playful mode, Bodywash haven’t abandoned the friction that defines them. “Finding the balance between comfort and discomfort in a song is a really intuitive thing that comes from our own lived experience and taste in music,” they say. “The lushest, most enveloping soundscapes often sound that way because they’re juxtaposed with something harsh and abrasive. For us, the discomfort tends to come from dissonance and feedback. I think the unpredictable, chaotic nature of guitar feedback is the perfect vehicle for tension: it’s like the kettle whistling on the stove during a particularly tense part of a film.”
Come and Go’ is out now via Light Organ Records.
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