Members of Braids locked themselves away with laptop to make album,

Musicians sealed themselves up in a room with computer

Braids’ adventurous new album, Flourish//Perish, was painstakingly assembled over the course of a year, in a windowless garage in Montreal’s Outremont neighbourhood, by three brains and one set of hands.

It was, to put it mildly, an overwhelming experience they’re not looking to repeat.

The Montreal trio, who in 2011 scored a critically acclaimed indie hit with their debut album, Native Speaker, had grown weary of their restrictive guitar, drums and keys setup, and the drab sonic palette it provided. Once they settled into their new selfbuilt room-within-a-room studio, they proceeded to compose songs for their followup album on a laptop, with no imposed deadline. Or natural sunlight.

“It was a completely different way of making music, but we were grasping at something and that was the only way to reach it,” says drummer Austin Tufts. “The first day of writing and recording Flourish//Perish was the first time I had ever used a computer to make music. It was not an easy change to make, from everyone having their own instrument to sitting around a computer and collaborating.”

The one set of hands manning the keyboard and mouse belonged to Taylor Smith, who ditched his bass for music sequencing software. The other two members, Tufts and singer Raphaelle Standell-Preston, communicated their ideas to Smith, either through vocalizing or referencing existing songs and sounds.

“We didn’t play enough on the record, and at times we felt alienated by that,” says Standell-Preston. This technological shift was not a smooth one, as it led to the departure of one of the group’s founding members, keyboardist Katie Lee. At first, Standell-Preston says, the lyrics on the album pertained to the subject of mental health, but upon Lee’s exit during the writing and recording process, this much more immediate wound became a thematic focal point.

“The departure of Katie and the desire to explore darker, more introspective emotions set the tone for the record,” says Tufts. “When you listen back to it, it’s a very beautiful record, but you can hear the strife.”

Spending so much time in close quarters — much of it in the dead of winter, and without even a window to glance out of — only exacerbated tensions.

“The discord that was going on within the band, it stayed in those walls,” says StandellPreston.

“We’re already tired of the feeling the room evokes,” adds Smith. The band has largely condemned the garage, and are hoping to write their next album in the vastness of Arizona.

As tough as the experience was, Braids persevered in order to harness the melancholic hues that permeated the haunted space.

Native Speaker was dense, disorienting, occasionally mathematical and subtly forceful at times, but recording it almost entirely through live playing, to their ears, sapped much of the music’s urgency, especially StandellPreston’s distant, otherworldly vocals.

“For Flourish//Perish, we stopped looking for the perfect take,” says Tufts. “It was more important for us to capture the emotion behind it.”

Flourish//Perish is released on Tuesday.