There are many places like home. On I Held the Shape While I Could, the 2023 sophomore record from Montreal duo Bodywash, home is a mutable thing; a location that is fixed until it isn’t. Over the album’s 12 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. Working toward their own blend of airy vocals, intricate guitar work and atmospheric synths, Steward’s abstract guitars and Long Decter’s cascading vocals act as the album’s ambient throughlines: blurring the digital and organic, gesturing toward something intangible, just out of reach.

Release Spirit, by the electronic artist Khotin, was in heavy rotation while Bodywash were on the road last year, soundtracking everything from the craggy cliffs of the Pacific Northwest to the dreaded NJ Turnpike, so the duo were keen to have him remix their song, “Kind of Light.” His version takes the tension and catharsis of the original song and injects it with blissed-out euphoria. It’s a track that’s destined for a sunrise slot in the chill-out room, channeling the West Coast rave psychedelia of Pilgrims of the Mind along with the more ambient influences that informed Bodywash’s last record.