Matt Grimble chats to lead singer Emily Haines and guitarist Jimmy Shaw following the release of their new album Fantasies
Metric’s Jimmy Shaw and Emily Haines are sat in a PR Office in Brussels, having spent the last two days in Paris before moving onto Amsterdam in the evening. The press machine for their new album, Fantasies, is clearly in full flow, but the pair are in a talkative mood, and happy to talk about their decision to entirely self-finance and self-release the new record.
"We got to the end of the last album and we looked at what we wanted to do in future. We met all of the big majors and it just seemed like nobody knew what to do in the music industry all of a sudden. Everyone was in a big terrified standstill, sitting around wondering what they could do to stop things moving forward and how they could go back to when they were making tens of millions of dollars a month. They can’t, and the world is moving forward and they were reluctant to move forward with it."
But if the tone of Fantasies is certainly less angry than previous releases, the band are adamant this has nothing to do with the way they view the record industry. Indeed, Jimmy seems keen to avoid the cliched rock star posturing that so many other bands fall towards: "There’s really nothing that rebellious about turning up your guitar, and going ‘I’m gonna press my distortion pedal and go crazy, woah!’"
In addition to his guitar duties, Jimmy has produced all of Metric’s records thus far. But when pressed to explain the slick sound evident on Fantasies he’s refreshingly modest about his methods: "I’ve never actually picked up a book on how to engineer properly or how to place a microphone, I’ve just sort of figured it out. I’ve always been fascinated with equipment and gear; Ebay is my homepage. I just spend my life collecting old pieces of equipment and I slowly put together this studio in Toronto. I guess when something’s a passion for long enough you just know how to do it."
Despite their distinctly Canadian heritage, Metric moved to London at the turn of the century. But if this has influenced their sound in the past, a return to Canada seems to have resulted in Metric returning to their roots. Four albums in, they appear to be settling down at last.
"I think my days of full-on nomad are over, in the sense of where I put my bed. I now live in Toronto, it feels good, and I depend on the musical community there. My family’s there and it feels like I’ve finally stopped running around the world, although as soon as I say that I feel like leaving. Anything’s possible."
The Canadian musical community that Jimmy speaks of has spawned some of indie’s most formidable names in recent years, with a quick look down the list including great bands such as Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, and Stars to name just a few. This is, perhaps, more than mere coincidence:
"I would say there’s a few things that make it what it is. There’s an amazing, invaluable education system where they really value music in schools. It didn’t get cut out and replaced by PE teachers, and we were actually taught music, taught that it was valuable. I went on music trips to Japan when I was twelve with an orchestra, and that was a normal junior high school. It wasn’t a music school or anything, just the weird school up the street. There’s also the government grant system, which is very generous to artists and musicians in Canada; it’s very supportive. Beyond giving you money, it breeds a sense of importance in the music. It’s not like you’re just some scrappy drug-addict kid wanting to be in a rock band."
But what about the bitchiness that inevitably starts to spread when egos start to inflate? "All the musicians in Canada, are really supportive of each other. We’ve had no problem since the beginning, with us and Stars, Broken Social Scene, Feist, Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire etc. We had no problem talking about each other in interviews and propping each other up and dragging each other along. The idea was never to be the biggest band out of your friends. The idea was to have all your friends be the biggest bands in the world."
Metric are performing at Thekla on 16 May. Fantasies is out now.
