Montreal art-rockers Braids reach a pinnacle with fifth album, Euphoric Recall. Danny Turner learned more about their back-to-basics approach

© Melissa Gamache

Upon the release of their debut album Native Speaker (2011), Braids received critical acclaim for their cerebral yet surreal approach to music-making. Determined to do things their way, the Montreal-based trio evaded collaboration before agreeing to enlist a producer for their fourth album, Shadow Offering (2020). However, despite being a positive experience, the pandemic killed off the promotional tour, leaving them crestfallen.

Three years later and the band return with their fifth album, Euphoric Recall. Looking to heal their creative spirit and more determined than ever to act on their instincts and self-produce, the LP sees Braids at the height of their creative powers. The meticulous combination of electronics and live strings gives Euphoric Recall genuine emotional weight, amidst Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s powerfully expressive yet abstract vocal prose.

Braids were very DIY before slowly introducing a producer. How has that journey been?

Raphaelle Standell-Preston: “We produced everything ourselves except for Shadow Offering and Deep In The Iris where Damian Taylor did the mixing. On the latest record, we’ve returned to producing again, which is where we’re the most comfortable, and our drummer Austin [Tufts] was the primary mix engineer on this one.”

Taylor Smith: “When Chris Walla produced Shadow Offering we tried to take a step back from our sonic intuitions by capturing a live performance in the room, cutting those experiments up as samples and triggering them for the record, but it’s our DIY approach that’s really stuck with us over the years. We’re very hands-on songwriters and rarely follow the traditional artist structure of writing a bunch of songs and taking them to a studio with a producer who might bring them to life on a record. We like experimenting with shaping sounds in a recorded space right from the get-go and so we brought everything back in house for Euphoric Recall and embraced that punk mindset of doing everything ourselves from front to back.”