The best song origin stories sound like they shouldn’t work. “La Renommée” — the third single from Bodywash’s upcoming third album Laughing At Noise (out November 20 on Light Organ Records) — started when Chris Steward was reading Kim Gordon’s autobiography and listening to a lot of EVOL-era Sonic Youth, and decided to write something with “the same hushed sense of urgency.” Then the first verse drums came out bossa-nova-inspired, somehow, and everything locked in.

The lyrics split the difference between two guard figures: a fictional bartender and a real Montreal statue — La Renommée, a winged woman in Jeanne Mance Parc that lyricist Rosie Long Decter was thinking about thanks to Kasia Van Schaik’s Women Among Monuments. “The idea is that those two figures are maybe the same — standing guard over the city from their fixed perch.” A song about fictional and real guardians, sung with quiet power, over drums that shouldn’t fit and do.

Bodywash — Steward and Long Decter, meeting in a university dorm-room practice space, now in their early thirties — have been building toward this record for a decade. Laughing At Noise is their “Montreal album,” produced over a year at Autoland Audio in Parc-Ex and mixed by Asher Gould-Murtagh: looser, noisier, rougher around the edges than their previous work, trading fidelity for feeling. Their press bio names the lineage plainly — Elliott Smith and Kim Gordon as chroniclers of modern malaise — and the singles so far back it up: “Lapsang” (Stereogum’s 5 Best Songs of the Week, an ode to waiting for the 55 bus in Little Italy) and “Come and Go.”

Their past releases have drawn acclaim from NPR Music, Stereogum, AllMusic, and Bandcamp Daily, and they’ve toured North America and the UK supporting Airiel, Land of Talk, and Zoon. The album release show is December 5th at Montreal’s La Sotterenea.

“La Renommée” is a mesmeric rocker — Stereogum’s word, and the right one — that proves dream-pop can be quiet, noisy, literary, and danceable all at once. A statue, a bartender, a bossa-nova beat, and Kim Gordon’s ghost in the room. One of the week’s most singular listens.

RATING: 4.5/5

LISTEN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVrIxspxJhQ