Hometown: Montreal, Canada
Members: Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Austin Tufts, Taylor Smith
Current Release: Flourish//Perish
For Fans of: Animal Collective, Yeasayer, Grimes
They say the best way to the heart is through the stomach, and in a Calgary high school cafeteria 12 years ago, the four members of Braids decided to form a band while buying a blueberry muffin. Shift the tassels on graduation caps, fast forward a few years and move the location to Montreal, and Braids had morphed into an exciting young act of four university students making its way in the same scene that bred Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire.
?One could certainly suggest that Braids are no longer up-and-comers, given the attention they’ve already received in their short career. Their 2011 debut, Native Speaker, was shortlisted for a Canadian Polaris Prize, and their music culled enthusiastic nods from critics, fans and heavyweight musicians alike. Two years since the release of Native Speaker, the group has just released their sophomore effort, Flourish//Perish, from which they have been steadily sharing tracks online in the past few weeks. But as Flourish//Perish shows after one listen, Braids have taken that acclaimed sound and turned it upside down.
?When drummer Austin Tufts calls from New York to talk about the band’s progression on its new album, there’s no question how these three years have changed the band. Braids now sees itself as a new animal: one with different stripes, but also one that Tufts confirms is no less sincere or authentic than it was from the start.
?“We came from Calgary, which was very, very small and community-based, and we were afraid that when we moved to Montreal, that we’d be lost in the shuffle,” he says.
?Finding the right support, they discovered, was the key to standing out in Montreal’s sprawling hub of filmmakers, musicians and artists. The band spent some of their most important formative years at Lab Synthèse, an indie loft in the heart of Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood that Tufts calls a “creative haven” for a number of fledgling artists. The band became fast friends with the owners of the loft, the Cowan brothers, who took the young musicians under their wing and pulled them into a musical community that Tufts fondly asserts was “very homey and based on the right things.”
?Sebastian Cowan is the founder of Arbutus Records, who distributed their sophomore album in Canada, while his brother Alex forms one half of vocalist Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s side project, Blue Hawaii. Thanks to the Cowans’ large performance and studio space, the band was able to rehearse and record their first demos, ones which would form the first strains of their debut album Native Speaker.
One of the biggest shifts for the band since their beginnings occurred when keyboardist Katie Lee left the band last year, setting off a dark, introspective period for the group. Tufts noted that the split with Katie acted as the backdrop for some of the new material, adding a sombre tone to their new music and “giving the record the emotionally potency” it has.
?“It was really punctuated by her departure, making us realize that this idyllic dream of us being four best friends from Calgary who are in a band that’s this whole collective was no longer really happening,” he says.
?Another major directive for the group was the decision to shift gears in their sound. The term “exploring” emerges in the conversation often, which makes sense given Braids’ natural progression seems marked by a sense of restless personal and artistic exploration. The new album Flourish // Perish finds the group foraying into new sonic territory, experimenting within the digital realm and reining in guitar work almost completely in favor of lush electronic soundscapes. The shift is largely due to the fact that the group thought they had hit a creative wall during songwriting sessions where they would jam for hours but felt limited by the sounds delivered by a guitar.
?“We didn’t want to recreate something we’d already done once, and we wanted to push ourselves as musicians,” Tufts says. “We were hearing different sounds in our head. We were in a totally different place in our lives, we were feeling different emotions, and we wanted to tap into those. So we started using a computer.”
?Straying away from the familiar sounds of a glowing debut, though, often means alienating fans. Tufts described how the shift in production, which was evident already with the release of their In Kind / Amends EP, received mixed reviews, some from people who felt the band had “lost all that made them special.” Following the release of the EP, the group took to Twitter to address the change, comparing the negative reception to the way people reacted to Bob Dylan’s iconic ‘60s Newport Folk set, when the songwriter traded in his acoustic guitar for a plugged-in Fender Stratocaster. “Feeling the bob dylan switches to electric guitar cold shoulder,” the band proclaimed on Twitter.
?Tufts expressed disappointment with the criticism, calling it “naive” for anyone to expect the group to be “at the same place as artists and as people at age 19 as we were at 22.” Explaining, he said, “Those three years are so formative for people. You change so much, you grow so much. You fall in love, you fall out of love. You have your heart ripped out. You go on tour and see 25 different countries in one year. You experience amazing things and you wanna talk about that in a new fresh way that’s gonna push you and forward you.”
Some of these personal changes he describes are evident within the lyrics of the album, which Tufts says “are in a very, very different place than they were before.” Standell-Preston’s writing has become “more conclusive and a lot less questioning,” but this time she’s centered her powerfully vibrant narratives around Lee’s departure, themes like mental illness and a focus on “trying to find herself as a woman and as a sexual being.”
?Despite suggestions that Braids have lost part of themselves or hopped the electronic music bandwagon, Tufts notes they “are just trying to do something that feels good and honest.” And indeed, the sincerity in their music indicates a group that is driven by a dedication to their craft and a sense of integrity to who they are, despite the shifts and turns that their collective and music have taken over the years.