More about: Metric

COVID-19. Interviewing bands in 2022, it’s rare that you’ll find an article that doesn’t mention it. After all, it’s only this year that many artists have embarked on their first full tour since the pandemic rudely disrupted our lives. 

For Canadian rock band Metric, not only did the pandemic shape the conception of eighth album Formentera but the record perfectly encapsulates the last couple of years, conveying the claustrophobic confusion of the early months before finding joy and release in accepting our fate via grandiose arrangements and flights of imagination. 

Meeting at the modest headquarters of the band’s PR firm, MBC PR, on release day, guitarist and producer Jimmy Shaw – dressed for the hot weather in a buttoned-down shirt, shorts, baseball cap and shades and emitting eloquence and purpose in the half-hour spent with Gigwise – picks up the story of Formentera: “It was an interesting thing that happened. 

“There's a guy named Liam O'Neil, who we've known for a long, long time - he was in the band The Stills from Montreal. We toured with them back in 2003 and he's been a friend of ours for 20 years almost. He was a big part of [previous albums] Synthetica and Pagans in Vegas. In the last five years or so he's been playing keyboards with Kings of Leon and he works a lot. He's is an extremely talented musician.  

“And before the pandemic happened over the last couple of years, between 2018 and 2020, me and him have this sort of electronic project that we do together mostly just for fun. It's kind of like John Hopkins and Boards of Canada with this other guy as well when we were in my studio in Toronto, in the last week before March 13, 2020, and we were finishing this record that we made, which will come out one day, and we'd written a ton of this electronic music.  

“We would just get in the studio, pull up walls of modular synths and just jam for two hours and then piece them into things. Then all of a sudden, this thing [COVID-19] hit. Emily [Haines – Metric’s singer-songwriter] and I both went to the country. Our houses are five minutes away from each other. Within about a month, Kings of Leon’s plans were cancelled so Liam was free, and we got him to come up. We started making music".  

“We got a bunch of gear from my studio in the city and set it up in Emily's house. We started writing all this Metric music and Liam and I had this backlog of all this electronic stuff so we started playing it for Emily. She would pick up on it without missing a step. We were doing this in Emily's house in the summertime. She would come down with no shoes on and just get in front of a microphone, and just riff and the songs were coming out of nowhere. So that's how it really started.  

“You know, we realised a couple of months later that [the pandemic] wasn't going to end and we weren't gonna be able to return to normal life as we knew it. We liked making music in the country where we were so we found this converted church and moved our studio into it, which is just one minute down the road from my place in the country. It's got multiple bedrooms so the band could come and stay there when Josh [Winstead – bassist] and Jules [Scott Key – drummer] were finally able to cross the border, which was about a year into it and they came up when we started recording all this stuff. That's kind of what happened.” 

Cast your mind back to the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown and, for those of us lucky enough to simply have to shift office work to the home and suddenly be rewarded with aeons of time, promises were made to devote to various crafts, whether it was learning a new language, sharpening baking skills or taking up life drawing. Much of this promise went unfulfilled but, for Metric, the output was a nine-track opus close to, if not, the best album the band have made during their impressive 20-year career with Gigwise awarding Formentera 9/10. 

Explaining the approach to the album, Shaw says: “Due to the circumstances, we had a lot of time, a lot of mental space, a lot of physical space, as we made the record in the countryside. At the time, people couldn't come visit us and we couldn't go visit them. So it was just this small group of people with what felt like eternity and we were really allowed to just let our imagination go crazy and do whatever we thought of.  

“There was no sense of showing up in the studio and being like: ‘I have this totally wild idea about turning the song completely upside down but let's not do it, because we don't have the time’. It was like: ‘fuck it. Let's try it’, you know? So we tried everything. And I feel like as a musician and a producer, I went to the end of my imagination. And that's cool because you don't always get to do that. Sometimes you don't feel like you're capable of it. Sometimes you don't feel like you have the time and the space, or the support. So I’m quite grateful.”  

Writing began in June 2020 with Shaw, Haines and O’Neil holed up in Shaw’s recording studio in a hamlet north of Toronto. Bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott Key joined them from south of the border a full 11 months later. Four to six weeks later, the tracks were recorded. 

Shaw and O’Neil initially took on the co-production and engineering of the record before being joined by Gus Van Go of Montreal band The Stills for further fine-tuning. “Being a producer can mean a million different things,” Shaw explains. “In this specific case, it was basically produced by me and Liam for the first year and we didn't really know that there was going to be anybody else involved when we realised that we'd gone really, really far with it, but it was missing the feeling of the band and that’s one of the things that Metric tries to do, and we've always tried to do, and is very difficult in terms of mastering the line between electronic music and rock music.  

“It's a very difficult line to ride and most of the time fails miserably. I don't feel like there's a million examples of it being done well. Even in Metric’s history, I feel like there's sometimes when I get so tired of trying to ride the line that I'd rather just sit on one side. Live It Out was very much a rock record, Pagans in Vegas was very much an electronic record. There's only some of our records that I've actually had enough energy to try and ride the line and this one, we definitely tried to ride the line again but we did it in a slightly different way. We did it in the sense that there were electronic moments and there were band moments. We tried to not layer them across the board. So Liam and I came up with sort of this aesthetic".

“Once we realised that that's what we wanted to do and we were gonna get Josh and Jules to come up, we decided that we wanted a third guy to be the producer for the band moments because I would need to then go be in the band. Liam is a fantastic engineer and he has an incredible way of relating to Jules, who has his own language of rhythm and music and Liam speaks it perfectly, which is wild to me. They just have this amazing communication. But Gus was a perfect outsider to bring in and have him see things with objectivity that Liam and I had long lost. So we ended up bringing him in to do that role.  

“We joked every single night that it was so simple because no one had to have a paternal producer hat on. It was like the hat was getting passed around almost hourly. So no one was exhausted while the band's partying in the backyard, you know. It was like, we would do something and I would engineer a little bit and Gus would mic up the drums, and Liam would do a little bit of editing and it would just kind of get passed around all the time. So no one ever really got exhausted. And we would joke all the time that I'm never making a record with less than three producers ever again.” 

Addressing the pandemic in songs causes great debate in the music community. Some artists purposefully shied away from it early on as they felt it was too soon to fully comprehend its impact whilst others embraced the nightmarishness of the shared experience the world was going through. The pandemic is a key current of Formentera but Metric sought to avoid limiting its shelf life. “We very consciously didn't want to make a mid-pandemic record,” Shaw confides. “We wanted to make an end-of-pandemic record. And I think what we ended up making was one that sort of depicts the entire arc of the whole thing. 

“It starts very much the way that I think we all felt when it when this thing began, and we were all sort of like: ‘what the fuck is going on?’ And, ideally, it ends with a huge party and you being able to be with your friends and be in the world and feel free.” 

Shaw reveals that enough songs were created to feature across two albums, with plans to release those currently stowed away at a later date but, despite this, there was a feeling that Formentera was missing something. That missing something was All Comes Crashing – the filling in the opening three-song sandwich where the feel is very much one of anguish, hopelessness and defiance, and the album’s first single. 

Shaw says: “Even though we had all this other material, we felt like there was one song that was missing. We sat down with Emily and she played voice notes of her just sitting at the piano and ‘All Comes Crashing’ was one of them. We thought: that's the piece that's missing. We did that one last. I really feel like that's an essential piece because ‘Doomscroller’ tries to convey the feeling of confusion and stress. With ‘All Comes Crashing’ being second [on the record] it kind of relaxes you in the sense that it's such a clear message of: who do you want beside you when this [end of days] goes down? 

“We all went through this in a sense, having to choose who you were going to be around [during the pandemic]. It was the weirdest thing - like, choose your bubble, you know? I have incredible friends who will remain incredible friends, and we just decided to not see each other for a year. And it was cool. It's fine. It wasn't personal. It's just where we were both at. And then there were people that you decided that you needed to know that you were able to see them. We now know what that feeling is like as a culture.” 

Elsewhere, 10-minute opener ‘Doomscroller’ chronicles the all-too-easy-to-find darkness in the world before Haines declares her love for the subject of the song over contemplative piano. So, who is the subject of the song? “I think it's everyone,” Shaw answers. “I think it's the listener. That's definitely what I get from it, even to the extent that I feel like it includes me. I've always felt that way about Emily's vocals. I would include myself on the fan side of her lyrical perspective than her side of it, you know.  

“One of the things that I feel like she does, and she does again for me as much as anybody else, is, she has a way of poetically helping you interpret the world around you. The world is pretty confusing, not just now, it's always been confusing. It's a highly dynamic place.  

“Sometimes, when someone says something politically, it just resonates and helps you make sense of things. Her role as an artist and as a lyricist is to be perceptive and help interpret. There are other people who help you party and other people who are helping you deal with sadness and relationships and things like that; hers is to help you understand the socio-political landscape around you. It's just what she does.  

“So, the first part of the song is like ‘hey, man, the socio-political landscape is pretty fucked up and you're probably finding out about it, at like 5,000 words a second, as you're scrolling through your phone, same as me. I’m right there with you. Don't give up, it's going to be okay’. And then at the end, in the piano part, she says: ‘take something for the pain, but not something to conceal it, rather something to magnify it up’, because I think, in her mind, the idea is to expose the thing that is causing you pain, not hide it. Once you expose it, it actually has the possibility of dissipating and going away. The whole last part is a little bit of a hug - you know, it's gonna be all right.” 

‘Enemies of the Ocean’ has been widely interpreted as an environmental comment but the inspiration for this epic song is a little closer to home. “It's more about the notion of having a relationship where one person is on one side of the ocean and the other one is you,” Shaw explains. “It's funny, I don't think I saw it that way until we started doing interviews. In a sense, we are the enemy of the ocean and we're winning, which is unfortunate because we should be losing.” 

For all that it’s the day of Formentera’s release, Shaw cuts a remarkably relaxed character. How does it feel for him to see the products of his and the band’s labour go public? “It's definitely twofold,” Shaw considers. “You know, it's like, the first part of the process when you're by yourself and you're in the studio and you start writing songs and you're doing this thing, and it's extremely free. No one's watching you and no one's calling you. No one cares. It's very free. And then at the end of the album cycle, when you play like your last three shows, the show is so dialled to the point where you could just do it in your sleep. That's also extremely freeing.  

“This is the spot right in the middle. And it's very busy. There's a twofold thing of being extremely happy that the music is out in the world and there's also the part of it like once your kids go to college and it's no longer mine. It's yours now and I have to stop being protective of it. And it's gonna go out there and end up in a Street Fighter [videogame – for example] - I don't know what's gonna happen to it, but it's not up to me anymore.” 

Formentera’s critical reception has been positive, earning a very respectable average of 76/100 out of the various music publications’ scores according to the Album of the Year aggregator website. How does it feel for your music to be dissected so publicly? “I mean, I don't care too much,” Shaw answers. “It's very similar to my attitude towards awards and things like that. I actually believe that awards are just fundamentally wrong… but if you want to give me one, I'll take it!” 

Still, the reviews are taken notice of with Shaw noting that most have recognised the true meaning and intention of the songs (‘Enemies of the Ocean’ apart!). Shaw says: “Maybe it's because we know we're growing in our ability to write but I'm finding that, for the most part, people are really cluing into what the intention [behind each song] was. I'm not seeing a lot of misconstrued intention and narrative around the lyrics and their meaning. I think people are really getting what we intended and I think that says something about our growing ability to tell the story, the way that we want it to be told. I think that there was probably more ambiguity five records ago in terms of what the emotion actually is and I feel like this record is quite clear.” 

This clarity of message could be attributed to the band’s evolving mastery of their craft – not a momentum that every artist pulls off with inevitable lulls over the course of a career. Shaw certainly feels Metric is getting better with age. “I feel very fortunate in the sense that I feel like we've only gotten better and I feel like a lot of artists don't,” he shares. “And I wonder if they feel like they are getting better and it's just the rest of the world is like: ‘no, it's not actually getting better’.  

I get told a lot by our fans that they feel like the arc of the band is that we just keep getting better and I feel like, in a sense, you should [be getting better]. I mean, it's not a sport where your body starts to deteriorate and you just will get worse. This is a learned craft and as long as it's not all about youthful energy then you should get better and better. Emily [Haines] and I weren't really all that full of youthful energy anyway. I think we're both kind of old souls.  

“Our music has always come from a place of wanting to understand the world and interpret it for people. I feel like we're just getting better at that and I find that kind of exciting. It feels like the future is wide open.” 

An extensive North American tour awaits the band and, though not confirmed, Shaw suggests that early 2023 is likely to be the next time fans in the UK can experience Metric live. That relationship with fans is one cherished by the band with Shaw explaining: “I can't really speak to why all the all artists do what they do. But I know that for us, what we do feels like a constant conversation. And if you're listening to this record, just know that we've very consciously made it for you.” 

Briefly, the early COVID-19 lockdowns presented a chance for humanity to do things differently and, crucially, better. Air pollution levels dropped dramatically in London and wildlife flourished for a while. Predictably, things reverted to type once restrictions were lifted and Shaw feels we’re in a worse place than we were prior to the pandemic (“It's like things are 15% worse and 18% more expensive.”) With Formentera, Metric at least got the memo and created something beautiful as life as we knew it ground to a halt. 

Formentera is out now.

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More about: Metric