Metric de-emphasize the synths on a rock-and-roll record designed for a set of stage speakers.

A few years ago, while touring behind Metric’s sixth, synth-heavy album Pagans in Vegas, Jimmy Shaw and Emily Haines found themselves walking through California’s Redwood National Park. They started chatting about their shared goals for the Canadian indie-rock outfit they have anchored since 1998 and, ultimately, decided it was time for a new direction.

“We realized that the essence of the band is what happens when we’re onstage,” Shaw says on a fall day, shortly after the September release of Metric’s seventh full-length, Art of Doubt. “If we could make the recording process more like we make the production rehearsal process, and bring the process of learning how to play the song as a band into the studio as opposed to afterward, which is what we did with Pagans, what would that be like? Every decision from that point on was informed by that ethos and by going after that aesthetic.”

Haines adds, “We had a very clear vision of wanting to try to go after, once again, the Holy Grail of getting the energy of the live-band experience on tape. That directed everything from the outset.”

The first step was enlisting an outside producer, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, marking the first time since 2003 that Shaw hasn’t served as his band’s co-producer. In order to better recreate the chemistry of a Metric concert, Shaw and Haines also rearranged their Toronto studio, and, most importantly, they told bandmates Joshua Winstead and Joules Scott-Key that their ultimate goal was to capture their palpable live energy. While the band may have touched on that idea in the past, especially on 2005’s Live It Out, for Haines, this is the first time Metric has ever been able to fully capture their stage dynamics on a recording.

“The idea of translation fascinates me,” she says. “Some people look great in person, but they aren’t very photogenic. I’m interested in all the different variations of trying to exist in these mediums. On every album, there’s always a taste of it. [With] a lot of the electronic stuff, it would always feel a bit too controlled compared to the way we would energize it and embody it live. When I hear Art of Doubt, particularly that [title] song, it’s the first time where I’m like, ‘OK, this is what I’ve been experiencing with the band onstage, which is where we really live.’ Finally, it feels like it’s coming back out of the speakers.”

The band recorded every song live together in the studio, working both in Los Angeles with Meldal-Johnsen and at their own studio in Toronto. They even convinced the producer to come up to icy-cold Canada in January and February. “We got him a Canada Goose jacket and we said warm and supportive things to him every morning when he came in,” Shaw says with a laugh. Meldal-Johnsen, who is best known for working with artists like Beck, Nine Inch Nails and Paramore, didn’t have an overwrought strategy for getting the musicians to let go.

“When we hired Justin, we had a bunch of conversations about the way that we record, how we do stuff and how we’ve done it in the past,” Shaw recounts. “He listened and gave us the impression he was listening, but then turned around and said, ‘OK, now just play. Don’t think about it.’ It was the ‘Don’t think about it too much’ part that allowed us to put on headphones and play. And the fact that I didn’t have a hand—or even a finger or a toe—in this production was really useful because I could just play my instrument the same way everybody else was playing theirs. We were just doing it.” He pauses and adds, “Perhaps we’d been overthinking it for 12 years.”

At first, the musicians found it challenging to embrace that spirit, away from their encouraging fans. There was a sense of vulnerability in playing in a smaller space before only a few other people. But, eventually, that discomfort wore away.

“It’s a little bit of an insecure place for us doing that in the studio,” Shaw admits. “Justin—in the first couple days of us playing like that—was so supportive. He would come on the talkback mic and say, ‘Guys, it’s such a pleasure for me to see Metric jam.’ The four of us would look at each other and be like, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ It not only filled us with confidence but it became so fun and so enjoyable to do that. We got to explore a side of playing together that, frankly, was under-appreciated by the four of us.”

Most of the songs had already been written, to varying degrees, by the time Metric was ready to record last winter. After Pagans in Vegas arrived in the fall of 2015, the band toured extensively, but Haines and Shaw still kept writing. In 2017, Haines’ solo project, Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, also unveiled their second album, Choir of the Mind, which meant that the musician found a real continuity to her songwriting. Some of the material that made it onto Art of Doubt was written as recently as January 2018, but other songs were previously discarded efforts they decided to revisit. “Underline the Black,” for example, is an older number that finally found a fit, while “Risk” was penned during the recording process.

“Every Metric record is usually a mix of long-standing favorites that haven’t found their right interpretation yet, and new songs,” Haines notes. “We went into the Metric sessions with a bunch of songs that were quite developed. It was an enjoyable process. It’s still excruciating—certain elements of it—but compared to some crazy misadventures of the past, it was pretty smooth.”

Still, Haines is the first to admit that she sets the bar quite high for herself when it comes to writing lyrics. In her solo projects, the singer is known for poetic lyricism that feels grounded in literature, with almost diary-like lines. It’s more introspective than her work with Metric, which is full of vibrant melodies that require a stronger lyrical tone. With Metric, she also often takes on social themes or reflects on the current state of the world at large. (“Dark Saturday,” for instance, is about rich girls who are oblivious to reality.)

“As a writer, I’ve been on a particular kick of challenging myself,” Haines says. “You keep making more difficult mountains for yourself to climb that no one asked you to climb, and you’re just winded because you’re climbing. If anything, I was holding myself to a task not to rely on overly flowery language, obscuring the point or hiding—which is tricky. The identity of the band is to go toward precision, in a way. It’s measured. That was the through line.”

She adds, “On this record, I sang everything with everyone around and I wrote in the room a lot, mostly fine-tuning ideas. It was super conversational. That’s partly because I had just completed a solo album, which is always more confessional, and I allow myself a lot more liberties in terms of employing metaphors and being abstract. So I was very much in the mood for Metric’s muscular requirements of writing lyrics. It’s conversational, observational lyrics.”

The title track, “Art of Doubt,” arrives midway through the album. It’s a guitar-driven, moody rock number that pulls into a glittery, mid-tempo chorus which highlights Haines’ impassioned vocals. In the song, the singer offers a glimpse of her state of mind, howling, “Now we gotta take it upon ourselves/ Next time the kick drum starts/ Drag your mind from the gutter babe/ All this isolation’s sinister/ So be kind to yourself/ There will never be another you/ There’s just nobody else that’s you.” First written in 2015 in Berlin, the song has gone through several incarnations to arrive at this version.

“It was the slowest song ever,” Haines remembers. “I brought it into the studio, and Jimmy and I did a whole version where it sounded like a lost Massive Attack jam. And then, being with the band, it feels like that song changed from a solid to a vapor. We boiled it. A lot of the delivery on the verses was just stuff I was doing in the moment while we were developing the song. I was able to finally articulate how I was feeling about the world and myself in it, and what I do in my band. Maybe, after all this time, I have some sense of self-awareness about the identity of the band and my identity.”

It’s those moments of clarity that the musicians are ultimately searching for—the instance in which a song becomes the best rendition of itself. “I used to call it chasing invisible butterflies with a net that has a hole in it,” Shaw says. “You have to show up every day, you’ve got to give it everything you possibly have and you have no idea what you’re trying to accomplish at all. You just wait for the moment when your heart flutters. You don’t really know what you’re trying to achieve until you achieve it.”

For Shaw, the process of creating Art of Doubt was particularly liberating. In giving up his producer duties, he was able to fully immerse himself in the recording, which helped give that enveloping live feeling. While he’ll continue to produce other artists, Shaw is fine handing over the reins for Metric indefinitely.

“I see it like a self-driving car,” he laughs. “The idea of driving into the countryside and having the car do the driving sounds terrifying. But I’m sure once you do it once or twice you’re like, ‘I never want to drive again.’ As soon as the day came when I wasn’t worrying about how the snare sounds, I was in heaven—and I’m never going back.”

Now that the album is finished and released, the musicians have found that it’s been almost seamless to go from the studio to the stage. They performed six of the new tracks live over the summer while opening for Smashing Pumpkins. (“It wasn’t like we were upsetting anyone by playing unrehearsed new music,” Shaw notes.) And they hope to perform the entire new record whenever possible, eventually discovering which songs they should place aside and which should linger in the set.

“It’s the easiest record we’ve had to translate to the stage,” Shaw says. “What we did in the studio is exactly the same as what’s happening onstage. The nuance of how we play it together is what makes the songs work. The last few records were done much more piecemeal—in the way that you might produce electronic music. This one was a breeze to bring onstage.”

“I’m super down with a rock-and-roll resurgence, as is evidenced by the record we made,” Haines adds, pointing out that Metric has succeeded over the years by making music that is rooted in four people performing authentically together.

“I miss guitars,” she adds. “In my life and in the world at large. Hopefully, it’s our turn to be a proponent of that and to remind everybody that it’s cool to witness the chemistry between people who are actually friends and the idea of an ensemble that plays music. It’s not just one person with a huge ego standing in the center of the stage.”

Have the members of Metric uncovered the Holy Grail and finally captured their live show on an album? They’re not sure. But they’re going to revel in whatever it is. “It’s such a grueling life, but, wow, it’s incredible that we get to do this,” Haines says. “Getting to travel the world and play this music just feels like an incredible luxury.”

This article originally appears in the March 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.