On their eighth album, the Canadian new wave torchbearers interrogate their career and mourn the death of a kind of rockstar success even as they celebrate their achievement of it.
In 2003, Metric arrived with a bitter look in the rearview mirror. “Dead disco/Dead funk/Dead rock and roll/Remodel/Everything has been done,” spat Emily Haines on “Dead Disco,” one of the band’s first Canadian radio hits. By this time, they had already gone through music label hell. First, they had accepted a short development deal with Warner Bros. in 2000 that resulted in a demo called Mainstream EP and their supposed first album Grow Up and Blow Away, then had moved to indie label Restless to release the album in 2001, only then for that label to be sold that year to another label called Ryko Corp., which led to that album going unreleased for the next six years. (Ryko Corp. was then bought by Warner Music Group in 2005.) It took a whole new label (Everloving), and a whole new album, for Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? to finally be released as Metric’s debut. They were, understandably, a bit jaded about the whole thing.
Now, almost 20 years later, the band have become Canadian indie rock icons, all while continuing to play savvily on romantic nostalgia for the “old world underground” that could still afford to be picky about “selling out.” They’ve also put their money where their mouth is, starting their own label Metric Music International (MMI) in the process of working on 2009’s Fantasies while turning down a couple of multimillion dollar offers from the majors in the process. For those following in their footsteps, though, the patchwork approach to artist development and financial support has only intensified since the early ’00s, when the music industry was still flush with cash and willing to take risks on talent, and weren’t themselves beholden to the star-heavy economics of streaming. Not only is it harder to say “our band could be your life,” it’s harder for most bands to support their own lives, let alone to turn their career into a cause, or statement of values. It’s into this increasingly precarious space that Metric’s eighth album, Formentera, arrives, echoing the memes about frivolous spending in the aughts that disguised the ever-growing distance between young adults and home ownership. On Formentera, Metric are fixated on the swift, silent retraction of the ladder that allowed them to ascend, and the foreignness to new listeners of the path they took to get to that elder status.
“Doomscroller,” the more than 10-minute krautrock-lite opener, is the main attraction here. Anchored by a rippling bassline that erupts with bursts of noise and supported by a gently sung paean to the “salt of the earth underpaid to serve and scrub the toilet” and their struggle against the “ruling class trickl[ing] piss from champagne glasses,” the song takes a class struggle subtext and renders it as bolded and underlined text. This newfound intensity extends to the rest of the album, drawing on tools like funk-rock bass fuzz and double-time drum sections to heighten a sense of ever-present agitation. “False Dichotomy” weaves new wave fuzz with a squiggly synth line that sounds like it could be ripped straight from Prince’s “Delirious.” It revels in the contradictions of rock stardom, which ostensibly rebels against conformity but often creates its own consumerist traps right along the way: “Show me something that can’t be bought/It’s harder than I would have thought,” Haines sings in a menacing but celebratory tone.
“Oh Please” fully compresses all this raw energy into a strutting, sparkling dance-rock gem, rapid-firing imagery in the vein of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” and the 1975’s “Love It If We Made It” with a completely incomprehensible reference to Slim Shady sandwiched next to “wildfires underperform xenophobes.” The structure of the song once again invokes the “doomscroller” archetype, even as the chorus zooms out and takes a look at the sudden self-consciousness of the person doing the doomscrolling: ”I thought this was just what everyone did/I thought this was just how everyone lived.”
The gravity of these thematic commitments might mislead one into thinking that Metric have decided to go full Rage Against the Machine. But when you peel back the layers of social commentary, the songs on Formentera are mostly characterized by an irrepressible sense of grace and appreciation for the unnamed “you” they’re directed at—whether it’s a lover, a friend, or the listener themselves. The coda to “Doomscroller” reassures that “whatever you do, either way we’re gonna love you” and the closing track “Paths in the Sky” finds solace in the imagery of a friend taking you out to a bar to listen to your latest “brutal news.” At its best, the album squares that clear-eyed view of the present with sincere faith in people and our capacity to love and support each other.
It doesn’t all quite land. In a saggy middle section, synth-smeared ballads like “Enemies of the Ocean” and the title track meander through wistful recollections of past glories with a raised eyebrow, like a more existential Drake. These tracks, like Haines’ references to the band’s “golden cage,” sour some of the lyrical themes without quite managing to find the right synth tones or chiming guitar melodies to recapture Balearic-rock crossovers like New Order’s classic Technique or, more recently, Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours. But with the glow of “Doomscroller” acting as a foil, even those lesser songs still manage to productively contribute to that contradictory posture of solidarity-oriented striving that suffuses Formentera.
Above all, Metric find meaning in the sober assessment of their own increasingly rare success story. On the stop-start anthem “I Will Never Settle,” Haines is at her most autobiographical, somehow pulling off the trick of directly expressing the band’s new raison d’etre without sounding sloganeering: “We belong to another time…” croons Haines with a palpable sense of yearning, “but if they don’t care about it/do you still care about it?” Throughout Formentera, the band sincerely mourns the death of a kind of rockstar ambition they achieved, even as they gesture at, and brush up against, its limitations.
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