Metric first burst onto Canadian music scene over two decades ago with their catchy, dynamic, synth-driven indie rock. Since then they’ve won multiple JUNO Awards, been nominated for three Polaris Music Prizes, had their music on major feature films, and toured the world.
And they’re giving Alberta some time this summer. They played the Calgary Stampede in early July and soon they’ll be on their way to Edmonton for a KDays performance, July 22.
We caught up with Emily Haines, Metric’s lead singer. She’s been touring regularly since she started the band with James Shaw in 1998. She loves being on the road, she says.
“I know everyone does it differently but for me it’s surprisingly a time of health, just out of necessity. I have to stay really fit, I have to stay rested, hydrated.”
Touring means new places, new people and “checking out new coffee shops,” she laughs. “It’s a band-wide obsession. The coffee need is real.”
Joshua Winstead and Joules Scott-Key joined Metric a few years after its creation and the four have been together ever since. How do they keep group moving forward?
“Our friends and our crew laugh at us,” says Haines, “because after every single Metric show, since the very beginning, it’s the four of us backstage talking about every small, incremental thing we could improve, ideas about how to evolve the sound.”
“We always take the attitude of ‘this needs to be useful to people.’ I’m not just writing for no reason.”
If they’re putting out a song, “it’s because we think it could help somebody have a good time, help somebody find clarity on something emotionally murky and just try to raise it all up. That’s how we keep going.”
The band has played in Alberta many times over the years.
“In the early days, those were some of the most, shall we say, ‘fervent’ concerts that we played, in Calgary and Edmonton,” Haines says.
The two cities feature in what she calls a “classic bit of Metric lore and humour,’ where the band was sitting in a diner in Edmonton, anticipating a show in the city that evening, when they noticed an advertisement for a Metric show that very night … in Calgary.
“We had to hop in the van and hoof it!” Haines laughs.
The energy of their first shows in the province left an indelible impression.
“I really feel like those early club shows that we played in Calgary were some of the most wild. Whenever we come there’s always a little bit of a memory of that,” she says.
“I like to always keep that feeling and the idea that you’re trying to generate positive energy, that sort of transformational sense that you can come out of a concert feeling renewed and energized, like you worked some things out.”
Metric is playing the Edmonton Expo Centre, July 22, with KDays. Tickets are available here.
“Days of Oblivion” from Metric’s latest album Formentera II:
