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, JimmyShaw and Emily Haines found themselveswalking through California’s Redwood NationalPark. They started chatting about their sharedgoals for the Canadian indie-rock outfit they haveanchored since 1998 and, ultimately, decided itwas time for a new direction.
“We realized that the essence of the band is what happens whenwe’re onstage,” Shaw says on a fall day, shortly after the Septemberrelease of Metric’s seventh full-length, Art of Doubt. “If we couldmake the recording process more like we make the productionrehearsal process, and bring the process of learning how to play thesong as a band into the studio as opposed to afterward, which iswhat we did with Pagans, what would that be like? Every decisionfrom that point on was informed by that ethos and by going afterthat aesthetic.”
Haines adds, “We had a very clear vision of wanting to try to goafter, once again, the Holy Grail of getting the energy of the live-bandexperience 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 thatI didn’t have a hand—or even a finger or a toe—in this productionwas really useful because I could just play my instrument the sameway everybody else was playing theirs. We were just doing it.” Hepauses 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 oldernumber that finally found a fit, while “Risk” was pennedduring the recording process.
“Every Metric record is usually a mix of long-standingfavorites that haven’t found their right interpretation yet, andnew songs,” Haines notes. “We went into the Metric sessionswith a bunch of songs that were quite developed. It was anenjoyable process. It’s still excruciating—certain elements ofit—but compared to some crazy misadventures of the past, itwas 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 challengingmyself,” Haines says. “You keep making more difficultmountains for yourself to climb that no one asked you toclimb, and you’re just winded because you’re climbing. Ifanything, I was holding myself to a task not to rely on overlyflowery language, obscuring the point or hiding—which istricky. The identity of the band is to go toward precision, in away. It’s measured. That was the through line.”
She adds, “On this record, I sang everything with everyonearound and I wrote in the room a lot, mostly fine-tuning ideas.It was super conversational. That’s partly because I had justcompleted a solo album, which is always more confessional,and I allow myself a lot more liberties in terms of employingmetaphors and being abstract. So I was very much in themood for Metric’s muscular requirements of writing lyrics.It’s conversational, observational lyrics.”
The title track, “Art of Doubt,” arrives midway throughthe album. It’s a guitar-driven, moody rock number that pullsinto a glittery, mid-tempo chorus which highlights Haines’impassioned vocals. In the song, the singer offers a glimpseof her state of mind, howling, “Now we gotta take it uponourselves/ Next time the kick drum starts/ Drag your mindfrom the gutter babe/ All this isolation’s sinister/ So be kind toyourself/ There will never be another you/ There’s just nobodyelse that’s you.” First written in 2015 in Berlin, the song hasgone 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 wasparticularly liberating. In giving up his producer duties, hewas able to fully immerse himself in the recording, whichhelped give that enveloping live feeling. While he’ll continueto produce other artists, Shaw is fine handing over the reinsfor Metric indefinitely.
“I see it like a self-driving car,” he laughs. “The ideaof driving into the countryside and having the car do thedriving sounds terrifying. But I’m sure once you do it onceor twice you’re like, ‘I never want to drive again.’ As soon asthe day came when I wasn’t worrying about how the snaresounds, I was in heaven—and I’m never going back.”
Now that the album is finished and released, the musicianshave found that it’s been almost seamless to go from thestudio to the stage. They performed six of the new tracks liveover the summer while opening for Smashing Pumpkins. (“Itwasn’t like we were upsetting anyone by playing unrehearsednew music,” Shaw notes.) And they hope to perform theentire new record whenever possible, eventually discoveringwhich songs they should place aside and which should lingerin the set.
“It’s the easiest record we’ve had to translate to thestage,” Shaw says. “What we did in the studio is exactly thesame as what’s happening onstage. The nuance of how weplay it together is what makes the songs work. The last fewrecords were done much more piecemeal—in the way thatyou might produce electronic music. This one was a breezeto bring onstage.”
“I’m super down with a rock-and-roll resurgence, as isevidenced by the record we made,” Haines adds, pointingout that Metric has succeeded over the years by makingmusic that is rooted in four people performing authenticallytogether.
“I miss guitars,” she adds. “In my life and in the world atlarge. Hopefully, it’s our turn to be a proponent of that andto remind everybody that it’s cool to witness the chemistrybetween people who are actually friends and the idea of anensemble that plays music. It’s not just one person with ahuge 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.
