In 2007, Emily Haines and James Shaw of Metric joined the late Bookie in the Toronto Edge studios to discuss the release of the band’s fourth album, Fantasies.
Looking back, it’s clear how forward-thinking the record was. This was intentional and it came from a willingness to let the album evolve until it felt right. “It just kept evolving,” Shaw says, “and I feel like at every turn, if we were unsatisfied we did whatever we could to just make sure that it was gonna be what we wanted to do.”
Bookie remarked that the record sounded like it was “from the near-future,” which was also on purpose. At that time, Metric embraced the tools available to them, leaning into laptops and digital technology to shape the album.
Shaw explains, “There’s a lot of tendencies to try and make records that sound like the records from the heyday, you know?”
For Haines, looking forward instead of backward was the only way to make music that truly mattered. She says, “It’s important to remember if you’re going to let yourself be influenced by the work of other people that when we romanticize the past, the people in the past for us, like those great Stones records, those great Beatles records, it’s like, those people were going as far as they could with the technology they had. They weren’t trying to go backwards.”
Metric saw technology as a creative tool rather than something to resist. Fantasies was pushing toward the future, and nearly two decades later, that forward-looking approach is part of what makes the album feel just as fresh today as it did in 2007.
Metric is currently on their All The Feelings Tour with Broken Social Scene and Stars. They will perform in Toronto on August 7th at RBC Amphitheatre.
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