Braids: 'We could never write a song about pizza'

The intensely emotional songs of Braids are mirrored in the Canadian band's complicated personal relationships…
Braids, from left: Austin Tufts, Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Taylor Smith and Katie Lee.

On a swelteringly hot Texan afternoon, Braids are about to play their eighth show of the SXSW festival. The venue is rammed with people suffering the heat in black jeans and leather, but if the band have noticed, they're not showing it. While the room steadily sweats, Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Katie Lee, Austin Tufts and Taylor Smith fastidiously soundcheck for an interminable-seeming 20 minutes. Finally, the four scuttle into a hasty if heartfelt group hug, ignore the collective "ahhh!" this provokes, and begin to play. The audience's patience – and the sound guy's – is worth it.

The four make music that has the sort of dynamism and scope to justify a word like "sculptural": tracks build around looped guitar lines and drones, punctuated by delicious shivers of noise that scurry across the soundscape and fade. All four sing and play several instruments but the band is fronted by the gawkily beautiful 21-year-old Standell-Preston whose voice slips from exquisite sweetness to Björk-like yelps. With her enormous eyes and heart-shaped face she looks like an illustration in a children's book, which somehow makes even more delightful the fact that the lyrics are, as she puts it, so "dirty".

"Well, I don't want to say, 'dirty'," she smiles, correcting herself. "They're graphic."

Against the subtlety of their sounds, come lines as blunt as: "Have you fucked all the stray kids yet?/ They're there sleeping in my backyard" from the song "Lemonade". The words "fucked up" have never sounded as beautiful as they do on "Glass Deers", where they're rapidly layered into a delicately percussive iteration.

We're talking in the lobby of their hotel over burgers and deep-fried chicken, and Standell-Preston is trying to explain where the lyrics on Native Speaker, their debut album, come from.

"I'm a somewhat… sensual person. And I love very deeply. And especially when I was 17 I was really, really trying to figure that out and trying to figure out my sensual being, I guess."

"Which was right when we broke up by the way," interrupts drummer Austin Tufts. "But I have nothing to do with it."

"Yes you do, you have everything to do with it," she protests gently. He turns his attention to his burger while she continues. "I think I learned how to love with Native Speaker. I guess I learnt how to respect myself and how to respect somebody else."

The band came together four years ago at high school in Calgary, in the Canadian province of Alberta. Standell-Preston and Tufts first met when they were 12, comparing belly buttons in the long-jump pit. They were both in the school's classical band; he played drums, she played clarinet, but explains: "He was at the back, so I started playing trumpet so I moved closer to him."

The two were boyfriend and girlfriend for a while but somehow the band stayed together when they broke up. "We just made it work, I dunno," says Standell-Preston. "I still love Austin with all my heart."

"Our relationship extends to so much more than just a high-school-relationship kind of thing," he says. "The fact that we can still be friends and play music together was really special."

Katie Lee, the keyboardist, was Standell-Preston's best friend at school, and likewise with Tufts and bassist Taylor Smith. "He was an upright bass player," says Tufts, "and I was a drummer so… there was just this crazy chemistry we had the first time we played together."

He's been talking in an excitable rush while negotiating a collapsing burger; a blob of ketchup is glistening on his chin.

"I can't take you seriously!" laughs Standell-Preston.

Slurping away the ketchup, he continues undaunted: "We always remind ourselves before we go on to play with intent and conviction and restraint. Because these songs are really emotionally charged, it's easy to forget about restraint when you're playing. Going into every live show it's so easy to get lost in the emotionality of it and just…" he breaks off. "Is that a word? 'Emotionality'?"

"'Emotionality'? No," says Standell-Preston firmly.

"Anyway, this is the last year and a half of our life, these seven songs perfectly."

The making of Native Speaker has been as unhurried and thoughtful as the sounds they make. They're beyond meticulous in the way they construct a song.

"Taylor cares about tone," says Standell-Preston. "Austin cares about time; I care about delivery and emotional content and Katie cares about fun and constructing things that stick in people's heads."

This explains both the lengthy recording (the drums took them three months) and also why they decided to record Native Speaker themselves. The entire record – made partly in Lee's parents' garage and partly in a spare room in the band's apartment in Montreal – cost C$500 (£320) to make. Now it's being hailed as one of the albums of the year, with critics invoking Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene.

"People are, like, how are you dealing with blowing up so quickly?" says Tufts. "We've been around four years and we've just released our first record.'"

"It doesn't change anything," says Stendell-Preston. "It really doesn't."

"Except that more people are coming to our shows, which is nice," adds Tufts.

Katie Lee talks about the band as a marriage of four and you certainly feel that when watching them play. Part of their focus is necessity: the music is complicated and most of the time each of them is doing more than one thing: toeing a loop pedal, while playing guitar and singing, for example. But there's also an inward intensity to the four of them on stage.

"We have to be connected at a certain level," says Lee, "and without that sort of emotional connection it is very difficult to be involved and be happy with the songs, to be of the moment and actually be the song itself."

They've had that level of connection from the start, says Tufts.

"To give you some perspective," he says, "we met four months before the end of high school year and by the end of the school year we all made the decision that we didn't want to go to school [they had enrolled at McGill University] because we wanted to take time off for the music."

Will they ever go back to study?

"Not right now," says Standell-Preston, "but we all want to further our education."

"If the band goes on forever…" begins Tufts. "Well, it can't go on forever."

At which point Lee deadpans: "We're going to die at some point."

The other three duly feign horrified disbelief.

"Basically," Tufts resumes, "we're going to keep riding this until…"

"…Until the wave slows," says Standell-Preston.

"Until the wave slows down," he agrees.

Standell-Preston has already written most of the lyrics for the second album, though.

"It's still about love… it's all love. I mean, I don't think I would ever write about going out for pizza. I feel that as you get older you learn a more subdued and beautiful way of explaining something," she says. "And I feel like that's where this record's lyrics are going. I'm still saying very simple things, but it's just a nicer way of saying them."

The title track of Native Speaker is about, as Standell-Preston puts it, the language people in love have, "when only you two understand it but you are so good at that language together, it's like your native tongue, you speak the same language. And there are parallels to Braids in that…"

"We've found our own musical language," Tufts finishes.

"Yeah," says Standell-Preston. She pauses, thinks for a moment, and gives a final, emphatic nod. "Yes."

Native Speaker is out now on Kanine Records.

Northern Lights: New Canadian bands


Feel It Break, the debut album out next month from this Toronto trio, will be one of the year's highlights. They make stirring gothic-electro, but it's the voice of classically-trained Katie Stelmanis that really electrifies their sound.


Don't be misled by the fey name, this Ontario duo makes unflaggingly robust garage rock. Last year's debut, Meet Me At The Muster Station, was hailed by the Pitchfork website as "a compact debut that feels momentously epic".


An Albertan outfit whose stuttering, overcharged noise-pop recalls Passion Pit and Crystal Castles. They put on suitably frenetic live shows and like to wear tutus on stage. A recent tweet summarised their philosophy: "Music should always have a sense of humour but should never be a joke."


Not strictly newcomers – they've put out three studio albums already – but it was their last, 2010's The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night, that pushed them to a wider audience. The grandeur of their sound, as well as their husband-and-wife-element, mean they're often mentioned in the same breath as Arcade Fire. HH

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