Indie-trio Braids of Montreal announced with a heavy heart that they are pushing back the release date of their new album Shadow Offering to June 19 due to the current pandemic crisis. However, in the meantime, the band will continue to release songs in the upcoming weeks. This week, Braids shared a new official video for their single “Snow Angel,” an impactful work of art that features singer Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s most visceral performance to date as she dives deeper into her anger, passionately. She leans into her irritation and anxieties of both her internal and external worlds. 

“‘Snow Angel’ was written in the immediate wake of the 2016 US election, as our collective conscience took a sharp inhale. It’s a diary entry of sorts – a snapshot of the mind grappling with our era’s endless barrage of content and destruction, continents away and close to home. *This* moment, with our world in the midst of a pandemic, is admittedly a new context. But I can’t help but sense the song speaks to feelings many of us are experiencing – uncertainty, angst, and a desperate desire to make sense of it all,” Braids said about “Snow Angel.”

“For me, it was deeply therapeutic to write and sing this song; saying things out loud can help us to not feel so alone, can help validate our natural fears about the future of our world, and can bring to light some of the hard questions that many of us are asking ourselves. I believe that art can change our relationship to fear. We hope this song can offer you a moment of catharsis and relief, in the same way, writing and performing it has for us.“

The official video for “Snow Angel” begins with the scene of a street lamp, at night, with snow flurries surrounding it. The camera angled up and creepily and slowly zooms in on the lights until the electric guitar disturbs the scene and it cuts to a stray dog seated in an ally-way between buildings. The video then follows a person dressed for the frigid weather, walking through streets and parks until she meets the dog in the ally-way. The visuals of this video are haunting and dark, suiting the vibe of the song very well. The video lasts nearly ten minutes, as does the song but is ultimately worth it after being entranced in the visuals. The final minute and a half of the video is of the trio, beginning as a close-up on Standall-Preston’s face, and ending with a long shot of the band far away, giving the video a more dramatic tone.

Shadow Offering will be released via Secret City Records, and the album finds the band at their most intimate, shamelessly flaunting a new sense of confidence through music that reaches a higher level of artistry and collaboration. A delicious and sociable release, it leads us through a neural hypnotic state of narrative. With heartbreaking truthfulness and accuracy, listeners cross a difficult world: one of gorgeous rebuttal. Even though Shadow Offering aims itself at the negligence of people to love and be loved, the album also hopes to repair fairness and achieve euphoric union. Its curve crests through the dark towards the light and learns how to dance with the woozy rhythms of the heart. The songs bubble, sustain, dissolve, expand, and retract. 

Lead single “Young Buck” is also out now, an effervescent ode to impossible love that exudes an undeniable magnetism. It was praised by Pitchfork, The New York Times, The Fader, MTV, Stereogum, and Consequence of Sound who called it “a bouncy good time; in the tug-of-war between mind and matter, these pulsing synths are clearly on the side of the body.”

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Featured Image By: Melissa Gamache