A few steps up from Queen West on Ossington Avenue sits a tiny vintage clothing shop, ground zero for alt-altitude in Toronto. It's also near the studio where indie champions Metric have been finishing their much-anticipated, long-awaited new album. But the exact location of the studio is well concealed.
Inquire inside the shop and you're directed, with barely a flick of a finger, to an adjacent doorway, as in “God, you must be soooo out of it not to know where to go.”
As it turns out, the sequestered backroom studio, built by Metric guitarist James Shaw and Sebastien Grainger, formerly of the band Death From Above 1979, could well become a must-know spot for indie musicians. With its stacks of old equalizers and pre-amps, dusty organs lining the wall and an utterly giant mid-eighties mixing board, it's where Shaw and Metric's singer-songwriter-keyboardist, Emily Haines, have been completing the new album, finally due to be released in late winter-early spring.
Currently the band, perpetually on tour, is heading out again across Canada, beginning tomorrow in Toronto, with the Dears and other acts, in support of Covenant House and other charities aiding children. But earlier, while still completing the album, Shaw and Haines could be found on the studio couch, talking about the very long recording process.
“I always used to romanticize walking in, and it'd be like ‘Oh, it's so brilliant,' and then you'd walk away,” Haines said. What she means is the exact opposite: It's rarely so easy.
The band's last studio album, Live It Out, in 2005, tried for that sense of upfront immediacy. Compared with the layered sound of Broken Social Scene – the sprawling Toronto rock collective that Haines and Shaw have also worked with – Metric gravitates toward a stripped-down garage sound.
But after only a few minutes with Shaw and Haines behind the stacks of pre-amps, it's clear that the two, particularly Shaw, enjoy the endless studio tinkering, the creative grind over stardom for stardom's sake.
For Haines, recording this album and feeling secure about the band is “total redemption for all the years of wondering why we weren't in a conventional [record] deal,” she said.
Added Shaw, “In retrospect, when I look back at people who did take those [deals], I'm not like that. I prefer to do things our own interesting way.”
This has meant an circuitous path. They have had to move their base of operations over the past decade from Toronto to Montreal, New York, London, Los Angeles and back to Toronto, if not entirely by choice. The new album is self-financed, but will be released in Canada through Last Gang Records.
“In this band, there has always been the question, should we have gotten a big, major-label record deal in the nineties when we were in New York? Or people say to us, ‘You guys should be bigger and it all should have happened faster,' ” Haines said. But, she added, this is “who we are and that's the life I want. You're constantly revising. In our case, it's always been steady, small steps.”
For the new album, the sessions were sporadic. An early session took place at Bear Creek Studios, a recording space in a converted farmhouse north of Seattle, where the band captured the first batch of songs with a woodsier, more mellow feel than Metric's usual sound.
Then last summer, Metric continued with a writing session in Toronto incorporating electronic, dancier elements. Recently, Haines, a compulsive traveller, went to Argentina in a kind of self-imposed alienation to write. Adding to this peripatetic method is the fact that bassist Josh Winstead lives in New York and drummer Joules Scott-Key lives in Oakland.
The album isn't trying for reinvention, but refinement. “It has more depth. But in terms of the material, we've experimented with losing a little bit of the trickiness. I think the last record was more prog than this one. This is more pop. We just went for the idea that simple is good,” Shaw said.
Asked whether Metric inevitably has a discernible Toronto sound, Haines immediately sat up and challenged the idea. For her, Metric's music is simply autobiographical. She has a hard time hearing similarities with other bands.
“When you write a record, you're writing a script for your life, particularly for a band like Metric which tours so much,” she said. “Any band can tell you that if you've toured for three years straight, certain aspects of your ability and part of what brought you into music to begin with starts to recede behind the repetition and boredom of touring.
“I know, at least for me, I was not interested in taking a photograph of myself in that place. It was really about using this record as a way to go further … and basically to make sure I'm totally uncomfortable,” she added with a laugh.
Metric plays Toronto on Dec. 12 and 13; Winnipeg, Dec. 15; Saskatoon, Dec. 16; Edmonton, Dec. 17; Calgary, Dec. 18 and 19; and Vancouver, Dec. 21, 22 and 23.
