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,