Braids released their third album Deep In The Iris last year, a smart electronic pop record with lyrics tackling relationship breakdown, pornography, and slut-shaming. A handful of songs written during the Deep In The Iris sessions that didn’t fit the album’s flow have now been reworked for the Montreal three-piece’s latest EP, Companion. One of those tracks is “Joni”, a soaring piece of pop songwriting built around a skittish electronic rhythm. “Symbolically, the song is about wanting to be fine with not knowing where you’re headed, not knowing how things are going to end up,” explains Braids singer Raphaelle Standell-Preston, “It’s the desire to make a ‘home’ within yourself when you’re, say, living out of a suitcase in a van, your relationship is ending, or you’re dealing with whatever difficult scenario life is throwing at you. The ye olde question – can we be okay even when everything outside of us is not?”

The track’s video, directed by Maria Ines Manchego explores the end of a relationship, with a couple striving to reclaim their individuality while remaining close together. According to Standell-Preston, the video started with a desire to film in Los Angeles. “I was spending the winter there, and was drawn to the opposing feelings that the city gave off: cluttered though spacious, freeing yet difficult, palm trees in a desert,” she says, “The song itself sounded like the push and pull of all these things. My roommate at the time, Maria-Ines, is a director. She agreed to make a video with me over a weekend, on a shoestring budget. I assured the band, despite having never produced a video before, that it could be done.”

“Maria-Ines hung out of a car window filming as her partner drove the freeway, our roommate spritzed my face for the wet-sheet-scenes, my talented actor-friend Bob agreed to make-out with me, the girl from the donut shop let us film in secret, and the editor, Mark – who had just recently become a best friend – did us a huge best friend favour,” she adds, “‘Joni’ is the culmination of people being excited to make something together.”

Watch the video above.

Arbutus Records released the Companion EP on May 20