“One of the things that we kind of tried to do on this record was really bring back the essence of band,” Metric’s Jimmy Shaw said over Zoom, “finding bigger wings, you know, and seeing what we were capable of.”
With just over a week until the release of their tenth studio album, Romanticize the Dive (out on 24 April, 2026), lead guitarist Shaw and lead singer Emily Haines somehow found the time to tell RTL Today Radio’s Tom Einarsson about the process behind the LP, the shifting nature of rock ‘n’ roll, and what it means to live the good life.
With their new LP, Romanticize The Dive, just around the corner, Emily and Jimmy gently blew Tom’s mind with their takes on indie music and the good life.
Having been a part of the indie rock world for over two decades – their debut LP, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, released in 2003 – neither Metric member claims that they’ve settled into a sound, an approach, an identity.
Haines, with more than a hint of irony, explained that “in our case the identity is that it’s shifting. The unpredictability is kind of part of it. It’s probably partly pathological and probably problematic!”
We’re kind of always pushing to the outside of something – we’re very experimentally minded and easily bored.”
“There’s something insane and vulnerable and punk rock about just saying ‘All I’m seeing is all my flaws.’” Haines is referring to the opening track on Romanticize The Dive, Victim of Luck, which takes a retrospective perspective on Metric’s course as a band.
Indeed, the pair think of the album as a return to the essence of what made Metric Metric.
“I think what we wanted to do was really just go back to where we came from,” Shaw noted, “so I think that there was a tendency to not only do that mechanically, so to speak, but also do it in the in the writing itself, and do it in the sound of the record. And it’s tricky on the production side of things because we’ve gotten better at what we do.”
Returning to their roots, Haines and Shaw admitted, is as much a technical challenge as it is a psychological one. What were they feeling when they made that first record? What are they feeling now, looking back?
“Yeah, I think Victim of Luck, as the opening track, really states that,” Haines said. “But that was also the last thing that we wrote.”
Romanticize the Dive’s opening track, which so encapsulates the LP’s (and the band’s) outlook, only came into being after the rest of the album was done – the prologue only being written after the novel had been finished.
The track took a good while to write, the pair admitted, and went through numerous iterations.
“The song went through all these layers of being almost like an inkblot test for myself in a way of looking back at what I was writing,” Haines explained. “And I was like ‘whoa, you sound kind of bitter!’”
“And it’s ‘Oh, I’m sorry, was there something that was supposed to happen that didn’t happen?’ That is the theme of the record.”
In this process of writing Victim of Luck (and the album more broadly), Jimmy Shaw said something that Haines found quite helpful – and which has stuck with her since.
“You’re a sweet person,” Jimmy reportedly told Emily, “who was not afraid to confront the things that you thought were fucked up in the world. I think over time, some of what’s fucked up in the world got under your skin and, you know, you get a little poisoned.”
“A lot of the making of this album was me happily having kind of a transformation.”
Later, almost off-handedly, Haines mentions Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film, A Real Pain, which also delivered a line which has stuck with her. “Do you remember the line in there?”, she asked. “‘Money is heroin for boring people.”’
As a musician, an artist, a writer – so Haines – caring can make you feel a little stupid. “Because it’s like, ‘Who cares?’ If no one cares, you have to just not care if no one cares because you care!”
“There’s something about that line in that film, which is hilarious, and so true, and such a flex in the right direction of the life that I want to have, as opposed to what we’ve all been spoon fed to aspire to in a way that’s just really boring.”
It was never about making money to Haines, Shaw, or Metric at large – that much is clear. If anything, they chase an ethos, an outlook, a way of life.
Shaw, insightfully, shares his perspective from the inside. “The scene that we’ve been a part of for the better part of two and a half decades is... is just trying to have a cool life, man.”
“It doesn’t really matter, whether you’re playing bar chords, or one note, or clean guitars, or wet guitars, or guitars at all. You could be playing an NPC. But if you’re trying to win the game, it’s a different thing than just trying to hang in the game.”
To Haines and Shaw, the means are the end, the process the point.
“I think the hang [out] was always the ethos of what people used to call indie – whatever that thing is. But we’re not trying to win, we’re just trying to have a great life.”
Metric’s new album, Romanticize The Dive, releases on 24 April. The band will embark on a tour later this year across North America and Europe, with the closest stopovers being in Paris, France, on 15 September, and Antwerpen, Belgium, on 16 September.
