Metric have announced details of their new album ‘Romanticize The Dive’ with the reflective new single ‘Victim Of Luck’ and details of a huge tour with Broken Social Scene and Stars. Check it out below along with our interview with frontwoman Emily Haines.
The first new material from the Canadian indie heroes since 2022 and 2023’s double album series ‘Formentera’ and ‘Formentera II’, Metric’s 10th LP will arrive on April 24 and comes previewed by launch single ‘Victim Of Luck’. It’s a song that cuts straight to the purpose of the album; celebrating the compulsion and ambition of their early days to illuminate what’s missing in the present.
“Let me take you back, it was the start of something,” sings Haines at the opening of the subtle slow-burner. “I was there not long before all the stardom. Now I’m in front of you and all I’m seeing is all my flaws.”
“I’m trying to move away from hiding behind the lyrics,” Haines told NME. “Purple prose aside, my dad was a writer who was always writing in code. And I like writing in code, but I’ve been pushing myself to just say it. I’m saying, ‘I was a starving artist and I was fearless, but now I’m a bit cowardly.
“‘I’m scared that you think I don’t look good, I’m getting older, I’m getting up here and I’m not really feeling like I’m owning the bad-ass person that I’m allegedly known to be’. If I’m gonna look bad, then I’m gonna look bad. The vanity is gonna fucking kill me!”
Haines continued: “I’m hoping that it has the same transformational power, even just for me, as ‘Help I’m Alive’ from [2009’s] ‘Fantasies’. Instead of having all these weird behaviours and because I was so fucking scared of being on stage I just wrote, ‘I tremble, they’re gonna eat me alive/ If I stumble, they’re gonna eat me alive, help, help’. There was no hiding and that’s where the magic of music is for me.”
The accompanying music video is made up of previously unseen archive footage of the band’s early years, “riding in vans, smoking cigarettes, playing in clubs and goofing around in shitty dressing rooms”, mixed in with imagery of the present as the band reunite with photographer Mark ‘The Cobrasnake’ Hunter. As well as taking iconic photos of the indie sleaze scene in the 2000s and 2010s, Hunter also took some of the first images ever of Metric when they were starting out in Los Angeles, and has returned to the fold for this new album.
“For the video, we found these old archival tapes of the band playing in Scandinavia in 2003 or 2004,” said Haynes. “We were playing to like 10 people and thinking, ‘We’re doing this whether you like it or not’. We were so lucky to have people like, ‘I’m down! I’ll dance to ‘Dead Disco’’.”
Keeping in that spirit of “going back to the days of the dive, the beginning of the band, feeling the love”, Metric returned to the city where they first met at the height of the ’00s indie explosion to record again at the iconic Electric Lady Studios with ‘Fantasies’ and ‘Synthetica’ producer Gavin Brown.
“For this record, we put back the OG crew that made ‘Fantasies’ so we could really look back at what our process was back then,” Haines told NME. “When we were looking for direction, we would go back and listen to our own work. It makes sense on your 10th album to ask, ‘What would Metric do?’ I don’t know! Let’s remember. What is the essence of the sound and the emotion of what we are?”
“We were so proud of ‘Formentera’ I and II, but that was really so exploratory. That’s cool and we can do that for the rest of our lives but Jimmy [Shaw, guitarist] said, ‘Let’s just have one more shot at the essence of who we are’.”
In celebrating their past, Haines said that they tapped into an ethos to live by today that runs throughout ‘Romanticize The Dive’. “People light up because this isn’t even escapism – it’s a way to live,” she added. “You can have friends, you don’t have to be in this atomised loneliness epidemic.”
Check out the rest of our interview below, where Haines tells us about life in Trump‘s America, returning to an analogue reality, and why there’s still hope if you let the light in.
NME: Hello, Emily Haines. We understand you’re in LA at the moment?
Emily Haines: “This trip back to LA is me being like, ‘OK, let’s try this again’. I’m starting to feel like I’m coming home, in a way. I’ve lived here periodically over the years. The band met in New York but we got our start in LA. They were really good to us – a scrappy little punk act doing our thing at the Silverlake Lounge. We met all of these people who were like, ‘You guys have something, don’t give up’, while we were playing to 10 people.”
“It’s funny with LA; it’s really pronounced here and there are so many ways to be here. It’s such an export: the look of the place itself, the Hollywood sign, people have lots of different ideas about how to live here. There are people in Beverly Hills having a very different experience to mine. I’m part of this scrappy crew that loves the hikes and my favourite place in LA is Elysian Park where you’d never know you were in the city. I’m also a little pissed with Harry Styles for fucking up my little local, The Beachwood Cafe. It’s fine. The atmosphere and lifestyle in LA is not actually glitzy and shallow at all. I feel very connected to nature when I’m here.”
LA is its own world, but what’s it like being in America at a time like this with all the Trump and ICE protests?
“With the United States, I’m a dual citizen so I’ve always had this identity crisis. Now, it’s just even more profound. You cut to these past weeks and we’re not even talking about the slippery slope; it’s about Americans being pulled from their cars and unlawfully detained. That is so insane. American citizens are being killed for this. People are in something of a stupor. ‘Have you heard the Springsteen tune? OK, cool! Now what?’ People are sad, exhausted and don’t know what to do.”
Do you think positive change can come around quickly?
“I want to believe in the system itself. All the moderate people I know are like, ‘the Constitution is there for a reason, it’s being tested, and it’s going to work’. Artists and musicians talk about this all the time. Our album is called ‘Romanticize The Dive’. We are romanticising – for other people – the time we came up in and the values of friendship and fans, not solo artists and billionaires. It’s a very different ethos and still real. Metric are making our 10th album, we’ve been friends for 25 years. It’s about something else.”
What feeling were you looking to spotlight?
“We want to be valuable and be there to romanticise something that’s not bullshit, in the same way that I grew up romanticising Neil Young’s ‘For What It’s Worth’. Those artists were genuine. Now, to me, I ask if it even works to write songs? I try to go in on a level of people’s mental health and self-knowledge to represent an ethos, and hope that it has a positive outcome.”
Do you think we could all do with a little more living in the real world and less time online?
“It’s hard to know how to move when we’re in this transition. After the killing of George Floyd, we were all so online in that moment due to the pandemic. A lot of people were calling bullshit on ‘online activism’, and I have huge air quotes around that because people were like, ‘Oh well, that’s solved’. There’s a lot of peer pressure around that, and it’s very conformist in that, ‘You have to say this in this way’ or you’re ostracised for not getting on board.
“Now I think more people want to be in the physical world. Artists make music in all kinds of ways, but it’s kind of cool when musicians play instruments together as people. There’s a paradox between wanting to do something, and not wanting to be someone who’s losing it online. Losing it online is part of what got us into this situation and ratcheting things up. ‘Online activism’ feels like an oxymoron but then we’re seeing what actually happens when people do something in the real world, it has real consequences. To quote our new song ‘Tremelo’: ‘Everybody don’t know, everybody don’t know’.”
You mentioned capturing the ‘essence’ of Metric. What would you say that is?
“There has to be an element of directness and the unvarnished part. Early on, as we were finding our feet and being punk-ass little bitches – which I say proudly – there’s a confrontational element to this band. ‘OK, well there are four people in the room, am I just going to sit behind the piano or have a real performance art moment?’ For sure, that comes from our early days in New York sharing a loft with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and what was happening with The Strokes and those bands. It was very fucking scrappy. What we’ve found is that the sonic scrappiness is something we’re a little tired of. I’m proud of that energy but we have those songs already, so here the sonics are a little more inviting.
“When I can peel my attitude back to a more vulnerable place, that’s the real magic. I’m a conversational writer and that’s how I write lyrics. What’s the warmest and most real confrontation you can have? That’s what we found from ‘Fantasies’. I was laying everything out, but I’m a very soft person trying to articulate shit.”
Lyrically, what were you trying to do here?
“Get out of my own way. There were a lot of rewrites. ‘How about you actually say what you’re trying to say?’ On ‘Clouds To Break’, I sing ‘All this running around, but I never found what I was running towards’. There’s an element of that. You’ve got to ask yourself if it was worth dedicating your life to this and if it’s working out.
“I just wanted to reclaim the levity of a life in music. Metric know to throw a party. You come to our shows, and it’s really fucking fun because it’s real. I always have these conversations with my friends about how, as a writer, I’ll always be on the outside of the mainstream, and it’s because I don’t understand how break-up songs are unifying. Crowds being like, ‘You broke up with me, yaaaay’ – it just doesn’t resonate. I’ve found my place, and Metric fans feel the same.”
You had years of struggle. Do you feel for artists today who can’t even get on the ladder? Can you have good art without a struggle, too?
“You see a pattern of generational stuff. Someone always has a version of, ‘I used to walk to school in my bare feet through the snow’. Everyone’s always doing that to the next generation, and that’s really lame. I’m definitely not into that. A lot of your fans get it and how we did it. Broadly and culturally, if people don’t have access to the shitty part then I don’t know what happens.
“Now, I really feel for younger artists. Even if you get a huge record deal – and we know the stats about whether they truly yield results – it’s all still on you to sell your fucking soul on social media. Just to get in the door, you already have to have such gross numbers. We had the opportunity to be so fucking broke, to live on expired power bars from the 99 cents store, to be in the van, but we’re proud and that’s a badge.
“Back then, you could knock on the door of the Silverlake Lounge or the Mercury Lounge. We got a residency in Williamsburg, and that was a game-changer for finding our sound. None of us came from money, so we weren’t like a trust fund frollicking around. It was about having that scrappiness and not having the expectation of it being so easy.”
Could a new band like Metric make it today?
“Music has been so devalued and distribution used to be impossible for us, other than burning CDs. You couldn’t have anyone hear your music. Having someone play ‘Combat Baby’ on KCRW after giving someone a CD changed our life.
“For artists starting out and trying to build something real, it’s almost too easy and too hard at the same time. That’s the vibe of the record. We’re not bitching about it, we’re just saying it was awesome!”
Is reclaiming that spirit the reason you hooked up with your old friends Broken Social Scene and Stars for this huge indiegasm tour?
“It’s more about the ethos of the lifelong friendships. It goes back to people being seven-years-old together. It’s a confusing time for people. Are we supposed to want to be billionaires? Everyone’s made to feel like shit if you’re not super rich, which is everyone apart from a handful of people. It’s not like I tried to do that and didn’t succeed; I tried to do this and succeeded! I tried to spend my life with my friends, make beautiful music and travel the world.
“We’re not selling out six enormo-domes, we’re doing something else. We want to remind people that there’s life to be had that isn’t just chasing that carrot of feeling like garbage if you don’t have all that money. It’s dark.”
Do you think you’ll bring the tour to the UK?
“I saw a whole routing with the Broken Social Scene for the UK and Europe. This will be so cool. We’re excited to take this little package of joy with ‘All The Feelings’ all around the world.”
You’ve a sentimental history with London, right?
“Jimmy and I were fortunate enough to come to the UK at the beginning of our career in 1999. We signed a publishing deal, did the whole thing, and managed to get a loft on Charlotte Road before the whole Shoreditch thing happened. Poor Jimmy was born in London and his whole family is British. Mr Canada went to Juilliard and pulled it off and his dad goes, ‘You want to go and live in fucking Shoreditch?’
“Of course we went right when the transition was happening in that neighbourhood. It was £90 per week then went up to £300 and the place itself was full of easels and art supplies. It was right on the corner across from Cantaloupe. We had this sweet old couple in the apartment opposite then one day they’d gone and their loft was full of desks and iMacs. The future was coming! That was such a pivotal moment for us. We had the fucking struggle of trying to get the deal and everything ending up just how it should be.
“We have so much love for the UK. We toured with Test Icicles, Death From Above 1979 and Klaxons and it was so raw. We have to thank that whole era for becoming who we are. We got the love, worked our way up, and when we play The Roundhouse it means something to people.”
Metric release ‘Romanticize The Dive’ on April 24 via Thirty Tigers. Check out the tracklist below and pre-order it here.
‘Victim Of Luck’
‘Wild Rut’
‘Time Is A Bomb’
‘Crush Forever’
‘Tremolo’
‘Moral Compass’
‘As If You’re Here’
‘Loyal’
‘Antigravity’
‘Clouds To Break’
‘Leave You On A High’
Metric’s upcoming ‘All The Feelings Tour’ dates with Broken Social Scene and Stars are above. Visit here tickets and more information. Information on UK and European tour dates is expected in the coming weeks.