What remains of a relationship after it ends? Pictures, text messages, mementos, sure, but the hardest things to hold onto are the fleeting sensations: the taste of a person’s mouth, the feeling of first standing naked in front of them, the dent in the pillow where a lover’s head once laid. Braids’ third album Deep in the Iris plays as a record of all these tiny memories, accrued in the aftermath of losing someone. The record is rich with startling little images: Stories of being pushed down the stairs, being confronted as a child for mistakes made, wanting to crack the eggs of a group of hatching pigeons flicker across the album’s lyrics. They dance above the quicksilver music, vivid and unreal, and illustrate that sometimes the clearest thing you can remember from a long-forgotten moment is the way the sun felt on your skin.

Sonically, Deep in the Iris is dramatically different than the band’s previous release Flourish//Perish. Whereas in the past the Montreal-based trio’s sound has been similar to their electronic contemporaries like Purity Ring and Majical Cloudz, here the band ditches anything stark and futuristic. Instead, they opt for fleet, skittering jazz percussion, crackling beats and stuttering cuts in vocals, while delicate, classical piano runs beneath the electronic instrumentals. The glitchy, warped surface is offset by the clarity and versatility of Standell-Preston’s narrative vocals, which pull everything into focus.

On "Taste", singer Raphaelle Standell-Preston describes how the taste and feeling of someone you love never really leaves you, even when they treated you abusively to begin with ("We experience the love that we think that we deserve/ And I guess I thought I didn't need much from this world," she muses). And sometimes the band examines that isolation in a larger, societal context. "It’s not like I’m feeling much different than a woman my age years ago," Standell-Preston begins on "Miniskirt", a song about rape culture and the cutting feeling of being objectified by men. On "Sore Eyes" the synths rise, hinting at an actual dance track, before they fall back to the throbbing repetition of the song's bassline. The movement echoes the push and pull of the song’s message, as Standell-Preston breathily relays her dual desire and disgust in a song about watching porn on the Internet. Deep in the Iris never lets you get quite too familiar, or comfortable.

In the album’s track "Bunny Rose", Standell-Preston contemplates getting a dog to ail her loneliness, one which will always be waiting for her to come home. And it’s this sort of heartbreakingly simple desire, wanting to be unconditionally embraced by another when you come home, that pulls this album's messages about broken relationships to a universal plane. And while all those intensely specific sensations of an ended relationship do not get clearer with time, on Deep in the Iris it’s clear they are nevertheless always somewhere within you.