On October 13th, Canadian indie rock stalwarts Metric release their surprise new album Formentera II just one year after unleashing its predecessor Formentera in 2022. And this year they are also celebrating the 20th anniversary of their debut album Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?Lead vocalist and songwriter Emily Haines caught up with Headliner to talk new music, the future, and escaping the ‘music industry abyss’…
You can listen to this interview here or read in full below.
A beaming Emily Haines appears before us as she joins our Zoom call from a particularly picturesque spot somewhere a couple of hours outside of Toronto. The sun is beating down on lush greenery and a vast wood panelled structure that has become the band’s new home - Main Steet Studios. Formerly a church, the band bought the property during the pandemic and transformed it into, in Haines’s words, “a world class studio facility and fine dining emporium”.
“Over the years, Jimmy has acquired a pretty staggering amount of skill as a chef and his knowledge of wine and food has grown in tandem with his knowledge of modular synthesis and production,” she explains with a laugh, sipping on a cold drink. “The layout of the studio is such that here is an amazing chef’s kitchen and a range, so whenever we start the working day you never really know where Jimmy is going in terms of what he’s about to say – whether it’s about the meal that evening or a bridge for the next single. It’s a cool tandem existence.”
It's certainly a distant cry from the existence that shaped Metric at the turn of the Millennium. The journey, as we discover over the course of our conversation, from impoverished, malnourished artists eking out a living by any means necessary, to the luxurious HQ they’ve built for themselves today is a profound one.
“It's funny because we’ve been reflecting a lot as it’s the 20th anniversary of our debut album, and we were thinking about when we moved to New York around that time,” she recalls. “The loft we had in Williamsburg where all these bands lived was not for human habitation! It was over a trucking company, there was carbon monoxide… a loft was a very generous term for how we were living. But we were so committed to our work that the basics of human functioning were secondary to the ability to create, and now it feels like we got our big payoff after all those years of sharing bathrooms and living on a bun a day!”
It's a topic we will return to in greater detail later on, as we shift focus back to 2023.
Prior to the announcement of Formentera II, the band opened up for the unexpected pairing of Garbage and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, who embarked on a joint headline tour across the US during the summer months.
“It was great, and it can nerve racking when you get invited on these tours, as these are some pretty heavyweight legends, but you have no idea how it’s going to be,” she says. “It can be really disappointing how assholic people can be and it’s not just ‘my feelings are hurt’, it can be professionally problematic for our entire crew. Happily, in this case, it was such a great vibe from minute one. Noel’s camp was totally cool. I don’t want to ruin his mystique, but he was super sweet and unpretentious and kind to us, and his entire crew was fabulous.
“And Shirley Manson is such an incredible artist and her voice everyday was incredible; you have Butch Vig who’s a legend… sometimes with people like this they just suck the air out of the room, but they were the opposite. Everyone was super friendly and just wanted to be there. It was really great.”
The mini tour marked a brief period of respite between the releases of Formentera and Formentera II. A by-product of the pandemic, Metric took the time spent off the road not only building Main Street Studios but also assembling an 18-song opus into which they could immerse themselves creatively. And while the Formentera project was always intended as a double album, Haines and fellow Metric co-founder and songwriter Jimmy Shaw grappled with how best to release it.
“We knew it was a double album, but we had intense strategic discussions [about its release],” she explains. “Because terrifyingly no one tells us what to do - Jimmy and I succeeded in our indie dreams that we run everything, but the terrifying thing is we are the adults and make all the decisions. It’s a lot of pressure but with Formentera we knew we had this big body of work and decided that it was better to put out the first one and make the second one a surprise release.
“It always felt like we needed a couple of years to make a record with touring and needing time to decompress, so for the first time – one of the few positive things from the pandemic – we had time off the road to build this studio and create this cohesive statement piece that we could just keep going with. It was real trip and we never had to come down.”
Both Formentera and Formentera II were primarily recorded at Main Street Studios with Shaw handling production and engineering duties alongside former The Stills members Liam O’Neil, and Gus van Go. Finishing touches were applied at Motorbass in Paris, where Metric favourites Air, Daft Punk and Sébastien Tellier have each recorded defining works.
But while Motorbass may have set the scene for the project’s final creative flourishes, it was the refuge offered by Main Street that set the tone for what Formentera would become.
“The majority of the recording happened at Main Street and the concept was like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil,” Haines elaborates. “During the pandemic we experienced this intense loss, we lost dancing and our ability to travel and exist in the world. So much like in Brazil where this person is trapped and has this fantasy world he goes off in, that was Formentera for us. It was a sonic escape for those who couldn’t be anywhere.
“We were fortunate enough to finish Formentera II at Motorbass. We made it through this 18-song arc and got to rub shoulders with the ghosts of some of our heroes. Jimmy played Frank Zappa’s guitar on the song Who Would You Be For Me? It was just everything we missed about life.”
For a band that have become famed for their shape-shifting approach to record making, often making drastic stylistic departures from one to the next, their extended stay in the studio resulted in them diving into a deeper creative headspace than ever before.
“Our ‘genre’ has always been ‘genre-defying’, and it’s a move I’m so pleased we started out of the gate with,” she says. “So, normally after any album we tend to make a big pivot. But we’ve established this new material that has a different feeling, and now I feel like we have so much more leeway for where we want to go with our next album, where maybe we don’t have to do anything too extreme because we have synthesized everything into this 18-song statement.”
The epic body of work that is Formentera and Formentera II is a fitting way to mark the 20th anniversary of the band’s debut album Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, which possesses a similarly epic backstory. The culmination of much personal and professional turmoil, it is a record that represents a triumph over adversity that would have crushed many others.
“It was such a circuitous road,” says Haines with a deep breath, readying us for a detailed retelling of events. “Jimmy and I moved to New York, found this loft, and one of the first people we met was Nick Zinner from Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The place was hellish and the air quality was the worst in the world. Everyone was struggling but it was an exciting time. But we were plucked out of that to go to England. We had a call from a manager out of the blue who had heard us and told us the buzz was so crazy and to just get there and we’ll sign this huge record deal. This was 2000, which was the peak of that era when A&R people were like big rock stars; the boybands were in full swing and everyone is making a lot of money.
“So, we get to London, sign a publishing deal and have all these conversations with labels, got a beautiful place in Shoreditch, and the first person we really liked was Andy Ross at Food Records. He took us to the Good Mixer in Camden, we went to the dog races with Graham Coxon, and he was like, ‘I’m going to sign you’, so it was all happening. Then he goes to EMI to be like, ‘Hey, I’ve found this band’, but EMI said not only are you not signing them, we’re cutting all your funding and Food Records is being folded. That set off a pivotal series of events that really defined who we are. We just fell into an abyss of the music industry’s worst side of being strung along, demo deals and suddenly your whole life is just demos and never being able to have any ownership or make any progress. Your whole life is like an audition.”
As money and opportunities in the UK ran dry, Haines and Shaw were forced to make the move back to New York. The city they returned to, however, was a very different place to the one they left.
“We had to go back with our tail between our legs,” she continues, “but the amazing thing was that we came back to this huge indie rock moment and that was exactly what we needed. We soon meet Josh and Jules and it was a total fairy tale… and then 9/11 happens. Nick [Zinner] came into our room covered in dust. It was crazy. So we then decided to take a breather and went back to Toronto for a bit and reconnect with our pals, but Jimmy and I were too antsy and soon decided that the best thing was to go to LA. That’s where we really began piecing things together. We played a residency at a place called The Silverlake Lounge and that changed our lives. We met Mike Andrews who made music for Donnie Darko and his friend who ran a label called Everloving Records said, ‘you guys are cool, we’ll make your record’. It was a really hard-won journey, everyone was broke and it was scrappy. And the day we finished recording our first album my father died. It was so fucked up and everything just tipped over. He was such a foundational person and part of why we were a band to begin with. It’s pretty intense for me, this anniversary. It was hard.”
There’s a pause before we pick up the conversation – the only one that punctuates our time together, highlighting lasting impact of those tumultuous years. Her smile quickly returns though, as she points to the scene behind her as a marker of all that has been overcome and achieved over the ensuing two decades. That they survived those first few years is an accomplishment in and of itself, let alone the fact they have consistently been making music and have just signed off on the most ambitious record of their lives.
“The reality is I would have loved to have a different story where Andy Ross came back and EMI put out our record and I lived in London,” she reflects with a smile. “But the reason we are so scrappy and resilient is because we had a very early glimpse at how it looks to have no power over your life. Even now with people talking about the democratisation of the industry and the lack of gatekeepers, the feeling we got from being jerked around in those early days was that it was bullshit and the whole premise of those major label deals is that they are spending your money. It works for some people, but for us to have the good fortune to come back to New York and see all our contemporaries doing what they were doing was a blessing. It was so empowering. All of those things that happened made us stronger and is why we are still here. The fact we own our own music is bananas; we are in such a good spot that was really hard-won at the time. And hopefully when people see us it makes them feel a little bit more empowered not to conform to bullshit and do what they want to do, to stand for something and not back down.”
It's a poignant note to end on. Wherever Metric decide to go from here, as always, is anybody’s guess. But it would be a fool who bets against them still standing defiant in another 20 years’ time, treading their own path and imbuing others with the belief they too can do the same.
Band images by Justin Broadbent, studio images by Emily Haines
You can listen to this interview in full below.