SPILL FEATURE: REFLECTING ON WHO WE ARE AS A BAND – A CONVERSATION WITH EMILY HAINES OF METRIC

REFLECTING ON WHO WE ARE AS A BAND

A CONVERSATION WITH EMILY HAINES OF METRIC

Esteemed Canadian indie rockers Metric is back with excellent new music! After taking a more exploratory approach with their previous two albums, Formentera and Formentera II, Metric returns to the essence of their sound with their latest album, Romanticize The Dive. Recently, I chatted with frontwoman Emily Haines about Romanticize The Dive and the story of how Metric’s song “Black Sheep” ended up on Edgar Wright’s cult classic film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

“It is kind of crazy to be on a 10th album,” Haines says. “I feel, though, when we started out and when we heard things in our head that we couldn’t translate; this one, we got there. This is the sound that I think we were always trying to get to.”

Haines shares that “Victim Of Luck” is in many ways “the mission statement of the album.” She continues, “our process was really just taking a minute on the 10th album to look at our own body of work and look at, ‘Have we strayed from the essence of who we are, and if we ever hit on something that we think we should protect and amplify, what is it?’ That was the Fantasies and Synthetica era that we went back to. I really feel like the lyrics of that song really explain the meaning of the whole album – romanticize the time when you were a starving artist, but you were fearless, and also there was no surveillance.”

“Time Is A Bomb” almost did not make it onto Romanticize The Dive. The album was finished before Metric started working on the song. “Jimmy [Shaw] went on holiday, everybody was done, and it was like, ‘Congrats! It’s over,’” Haines recalls. “I had this moment at the piano – this song was just there. I was like, ‘this doesn’t make any sense. Why am I writing this? I don’t feel like working…’ I recorded it on the piano very simply. It was just the progression, melody, and lyrics, and I sent it to Jimmy. Before he even listened to it, he said, ‘look, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but there’s no way we are doing this song. Don’t be upset. I’m not making any judgments on the song.’ I was like, ‘fucking A! I feel the same way. Perfect. Let’s leave it. I don’t want to go back into the studio either.’ Then, he listened to it and was like, ‘goddamnit! We have to do this song.’ It became such a sort of statement of the album that we were going to call the album that. We had everything ready to go, and at the last minute, I was like, ‘This isn’t right.’ It is sort of a sad state of affairs, but there is too much violence, and the word bomb can’t be a metaphor right now. We are too close to actual physical bombs, and I think it is not quite saying what I really wanted to say, which is romanticize the dive.”

PURCHASE ROMANTICIZE THE DIVE

The bittersweet “As If You’re Here” explores themes of grief and loss. “[It’s] a strange phenomenon that has happened a few times with Jimmy and me, where we will both be writing the same song without knowing it,” Haines shares. “He and Liam [O’Neil], who works with us on our albums, had just experienced a loss of a friend who had passed away and had written this piece of music, and I separately had been working for years on refining this piece that I wrote for Hal Willner [music producer], who was the first person that I knew who died from COVID – it was incredibly tragic to loss him. I wrote the song for him, and years later, I’m driving, and Jimmy and Liam sent me the music, and they were like, ‘look, we were just feeling this loss, and we wrote this. Have a listen and see if there is anything you can write on it.’ I was like, ‘Whoa!’ because what I had written fit perfectly.”

Although the big synth blasts of “Loyal” might bring to mind LCD Soundsystem for some listeners, Metric was not inspired by LCD Soundsystem for the song. “Our rule on making Romanticize The Dive was that all our references, whether they were visible to other people or not, came from our own catalogue,” Haines explains. “There is some ‘Stadium Love’ in there. The lyrics, ‘The visions fade before they translate,’ and this whole idea of like, ‘What is it you are trying to make and why is it so important to you,’ that really is the crux of what we have all dedicated our lives to. It’s this strange pursuit of something that we know it when we hear it, and we know it when we feel it, but it is completely bespoken and sort of in our own world.”

In “Crush Forever,” Haines utilizes what she calls her “truest vocal style.” Reflecting on the song, she says, “I always remember when I was a kid and going to music school and a teacher told me, ‘you don’t sing. You speak,’ and I was like, ‘Exactly! That’s what I want to do.’ I feel it is a style that I’ve touched upon throughout various songs in my life. I employ a similar style in ‘Cascades’ on Pagans In Vegas. The song that I wrote for Broken Social Scene ‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ is also in that style. It’s sort of this meditative spoken stream of consciousness feeling. In the case of the writing of ‘Crush Forever,’ it was a total stream of consciousness piece… Jimmy sent me the music, and I have a place in the woods where I like to write. I went out to these beautiful woods, with a meadow and this gorgeous view, and I just pressed play and kind of wrote this whole thing as this letter. I pictured it being a letter to a younger woman who is trying to figure out how to be in the world and, in doing so, figuring out how I should be in the world. It is not always so clear, so I felt like, in kind of showing the love for this imaginary girl, I kind of figured out my place.”

Many people, including myself, first discovered Metric through Edgar Wright’s film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which features Metric’s iconic song “Black Sheep.” “How cool to have Brie Larson sing our song,” Haines says. “Bryan Lee O’ Malley’s graphic novel, which the film is based on, he was actually inspired by Metric for the Clash At Demonhead, which is maybe not a compliment, but I’m cool with it. I hope that I’m a little nicer than Envy [Adams]. When Edgar was making the movie and working with Nigel Godrich on the soundtrack, they needed this song for the band to play… They reached out and said, ‘hey, do you have anything unreleased?’ and, weirdly, like counterintuitively, we had left ‘Black Sheep’ off of our album Fantasies, which anyone would have said you are crazy to leave that song off the album. Luckily, no one stopped us, and we left it off, so it was unreleased. Weirdly, we left it off because we thought it was way too much and almost like a cartoon version of Metric, which is exactly what Edgar was looking for. When he heard the song, he was like, ‘This is just too weird. It sounds like it was written for the movie.’”

 Romanticize The Dive dropped on April 24. “This one was so thematically anchored in us reflecting on who we are as a band and just my love and appreciation for the people I spent my life with,” Haines states. “I feel good being in the world right now promoting this because it’s a very strange time to be celebrating anything, it feels, and the one thing that I think we can celebrate is friendship and this just kind of scrappy longevity. There aren’t many bands that stay with the same lineup for 25 years. I think it is something worth romanticizing, and I hope it helps people who are starting out and that they might feel inspired.”

Metric will be embarking on the All The Feelings Tour with Broken Social Scene and Stars, which is sure to be an absolute blast! (dates below) “This was Jimmy’s dream,” Haines smiles. “He has wanted to put this bill together for a long time, and the timing never worked until now… We are just really happy to be able to bring our friends out on the road and create this experience.”

THE ALL THE FEELINGS TOUR: METRIC. BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE. STARS – 2026

Jun 8 – Moody Amphitheater – Austin, TX
Jun 9 – South Side Ballroom – Dallas, TX
Jun 11 – Fillmore Auditorium – Denver, CO
Jun 13 – Sandy Amphitheater – Sandy, UT
Jun 16 – The Greek Theatre – Los Angeles, CA
Jun 18 – Arizona Financial Theatre – Phoenix, AZ
Jun 19 – Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre – San Diego, CA
Jun 21 – The Masonic – San Francisco, CA
Jun 24 – Hayden Homes Amphitheater – Bend, OR
Jul 24 – Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom – Chicago, IL
Jul 25 – Fox Theatre – Detroit, MI
Jul 27 – MGM Music Hall at Fenway – Boston, MA
Jul 28 – The Met Philadelphia Presented by Highmark – Philadelphia, PA
Jul 30 – Brooklyn Paramount – Brooklyn, NY
Aug 1 – The Anthem – Washington, DC
Aug 3 – Tabernacle – Atlanta, GA
Aug 4 – Ryman Auditorium – Nashville, TN
Aug 7 – RBC Amphitheatre – Toronto, ON

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Main Photo Credit: Mark Hunter