Body Breaks, recently released a new Jordan Minkoff directed video for their single “Break The Icons.” The Montreal/Toronto duo is comprised of Matt LeGroulx and Julie Reich. LeGroulx wrote the the music for their album Bad Trouble, including guitar, bass, and drums, while Reich completed their songs, with her unique vocal stylings.

“Despite their youth, Body Breaks’ sound is deeply influenced by the sounds of Velvet Underground to Glenn Branca’s influence on Sonic Youth to Horse Lords’ refretted instruments. The duo’s sounds also harken back to the slacker sound of Pavement, Os Mutantes’ fuzz, and Palberta’s ramshackle approach to pop. On headphones, LeGroulx’s stereo-panned riffs ping pong from left to right, while his sparse but relentless drumming thumps away like a motorik Moe Tucker.”

“Initially, I was trying to tune my guitar to Balinese gamelan scales,” explains LeGroulx. “I quickly came to realize those tunings sounded very normal and beautiful to me. I finally settled on quarter tone – a subset of microtonal music – because it seemed to me that no matter how much I heard, it never sounded in tune.”

The album’s opening salvo “Between The Heart And The Mind” is a deeply personal song for Reich. “I wrote that song after I caught someone cheating on me and eventually came to forgiveness,” she says. “When you’re trying to make sense of something hard, you’ve got your feelings and your rationale. You need to use both, and somewhere in the middle you find peace.”

In her job as a support worker and advocate for the neurodiverse community, Reich met a woman on the autism spectrum who was prevented from dating by her conservative family. This feeling of helplessness combined with the upsetting sight of factory smokestacks on bus rides to her client’s house inspired Reich to write the album’s angriest song, “Work For The Man.”

“I would see the smokestacks for years and wonder why we haven’t invented something to stop them from being horrible for the environment,” she says. “It’s so blatant and normalized. Seeing them on the way to this house where there was a lot of repression made me feel really frustrated. When you’re forced to go somewhere every day, a lot of things can make you sick.”

order Bad Trouble by Body Breaks HERE