The Story
BRAIDS grew out of a friendship: four schoolmates who started the band in Calgary in the mid-2000s and then relocated to Montreal, where they self-produced their 2011 debut Native Speaker. Built from patient loops, live drums and Raphaelle Standell-Preston's soaring, wordy vocals, it was longlisted and then shortlisted for Canada's Polaris Music Prize.
Flourish // Perish (2013) pulled the sound into cooler, more synthetic territory, and Deep in the Iris (2015) brought it back to warmth and clarity — another Polaris shortlisting for a band that kept refining rather than reinventing.
Standell-Preston has always worked in more than one place at once, also making music as half of the duo Blue Hawaii. That restlessness feeds back into BRAIDS: songs that begin as almost nothing and slowly gather into something overwhelming.
Shadow Offering (2020) and Euphoric Recall (2023) widened the palette again — bigger arrangements, sharper songwriting — while keeping the band's signature move intact: the long, deliberate build toward release.
