Review: Braids – Euphoric Recall


Artwork for Braids' 2023 album Euphoric Recall




Braids find tranquility on their new album.

For Canadian trio Braids the recording process is sometimes very much dimensioned by circumstances, as singer Raphaelle Standell-Preston confessed about the journey to creating Lucky Star:

“It came together in pieces over a long span of time. Its inception began on a very cold winter night…it’s not the easiest to write music during Montreal’s unforgiving winter.”

Lucky Star is taken from taken from Euphoric Recall, Braids’ fifth release and one that Standell-Preston together with comrades Austin Tufts and Taylor Smith are hailing as their love album.

The track itself certainly sounds dedicated to someone (‘You skylit guide/I want to come back to come back for you’) but its fuzzy background melodies are warm without screaming total emotional abandonment.

As with a lot of the material that accompanies it, there’s a degree of separation between purpose and sentiment. Evolution’s wordy backstory is of, ‘Our pursuit of the individual self, which comprises all realms of human emotion, is sweetened with the intention and act of patience from ourselves’, but the track’s minimalist synths and bird-like pads are frustratingly for those who can only just touch this music a bassline away from being club ready.

Relationships were also thematically explored on Braids’ last album Shadow Offering, but there’s something more of an inner peace to most of what’s offered here.

The confessional (sometimes too confessional) words illustrate why, the devotion witnessed on opener Supernova like being a bystander in a two-way group chat, before then the tumbling lines morph into the political and back to intimacy again.

Musically the eight minutes undulate, the multi-octave vocals laid over instrumentation that’s sometimes laced with beats, sometimes glitched-out synths, occasionally piano, and the result is as confusing as it is panoramic.



Perhaps that’s an overstatement, or at least a naïve one. Braids have rarely after all hid their preference for experimentation, an approach which in nature is similar to Cate Le Bon or Virginia Wing.

Occasionally the template is more straightforward, Apple’s cyclical buzz and looped refrain – ‘Spend all my money on you’ – one for listeners who’ve stumbled into this space by accident and are wondering what’s going on.

Inside such an eclectic vessel the questions being asked are likely to be answered in many different ways though. For instance, the odd folktronica of Left/Right touts a messy, organic breakdown on which Standell-Preston occasionally scats in the mould of Fiona Apple, whilst strings bolster weird electronic noises, then abruptly stops as if all the competing ideas had spontaneously combusted at the exact same instant.

A shake of the head moment yes, but even more so because the highs can be exquisitely high. On Millenia all the elements – an intoxicating multi-octave voice, peaking synth-pop, lush orchestration – get mixed to near perfection.

Following on in atmosphere if not tone, over the nine-minutes-plus of Retriever an increasingly ecstatic set of crescendos build, the child-like note drops and soaring harmonies interleaved, eventually mimicking life’s slow path to happiness and self-realisation.

As if not wanting to leave, the odyssey at last fades into the closing title-track, which reluctantly accepts the unwanted roles of both companion and comedown, the ultimate resolution being simply to evaporate rather than function as a mere straightforward ending.

As it turns out the experience of love in the cold is pretty much the same as love anywhere else: Euphoric Recall sees Braids freer than before, but still unable to melt the ice between their current state and greatness.


Learn More