The Brag

Metric
Piece By Piece
By Alasdair Duncan

Synthetica is something of a landmark album for Canadian indie synth rockers Metric. Singer Emily Haines said that for her, the record is all about “forcing yourself to confront what you see in the mirror when you finally stand still long enough to catch a reflection.” It’s a typically-cryptic statement from Haines, but thankfully keyboard player and long-time collaborator James Shaw is able to shed some light on what exactly she means: “In the past, her writing process has always been that before each record, she would go away somewhere and disappear into total isolation for a few months,” he explains. “She would find inspiration outside of herself, get out of her head. This time around, she didn’t do that, so her writing became more about her, about her experiences, about how she fits in, and her life. She wasn’t writing about external things. For the first time, she was writing about herself.”

In the past, Haines has returned from her trips away with the raw material for songs that she and Shaw would then interpret together – so her decision to stay in Toronto ultimately made for Metric’s most collaborative album to date. “We wrote together the entire time,” Shaw explains. “She didn’t write entire songs as such – she wrote pieces, and then we’d put them together and take them apart in all kinds of different combinations, until we found something we really liked.” The band had a big board in the studio, and if a section of a particular song wasn’t working, they’d look at it, and find another piece to put in its place. “The record is almost like a huge collection of all these different pieces rather than a collection of songs,” Shaw continues. “It’s really interesting, because we’ve never worked that way before.”

After a decade of working together, Haines and Shaw have a seemingly unbreakable musical bond. She writes the ghostly melodies that characterise Metric’s songs, and he fills the arrangements with all manner of synthetic sounds. “My inspirations are sonic,” Shaw says. “I’ll go buy a new synthesiser and the minute I plug it in and I’m hearing new sounds I’ve never heard before, I’ll get really excited and think about all the possible ways I can use them to write songs. All of my songwriting is based on the exploration of musical instruments.” Shaw is not the type to think up a chord progression and find any old instrument to play it on – for him the sound comes first, and everything else follows.

In the early stages of writing Synthetica, Shaw hoarded as many different keyboards as possible, to find new sounds and new ideas. “I wanted to hear as many of them as I could,” he says with a laugh, “so in the lead-up to the writing, I scoured the internet to find the strangest and most bizarre keyboards. I ended up getting so many that I set up a little area in the studio that we called Synth World, and that’s where most of the writing happened.” One keyboard proved particularly inspiring – when Shaw happened upon a Farfisa, an old-fashioned electronic organ from Italy, it shaped a lot of what followed. “The Farfisa really spoke to us, and it became sort of a sonic fingerprint for the record,” he explains. “The whole opening to ‘Artificial Nocturne’ is based around it, as is a lot of ‘Dreams So Real’. I guess we were all just floored by the sound of it.”

My discussion with Shaw progresses from the arrangements on Synthetica to the songs themselves. The lyrics feature recurring themes of the artificial and the unreal – the synthetic, as the title suggests – and seem to draw upon some deep sense of unease with the state of the modern world. “We didn’t set out to make a concept record or anything like that, but at a certain point in the writing process, we began to see a through-line of a lot of themes recurring. The name Synthetica had been around for a while, and it wasn’t letting up. We were waiting for the moment when we’d back out and come up with another title, but that didn’t happen. It stayed with us.”

When writing the album, the members of Metric were all fascinated with the notion that, with so much change happening in the world and technology evolving so fast, it can be hard to know what’s true and what’s real. “When you read news online, you have no way of knowing if it’s true or not,” Shaw says. “You can have thousands of friends on Facebook but they can all be strangers. Entire relationships can take place via text messaging, without people ever meeting one-another. When you say something in a text, are you saying it? Does it have any weight to it?” The record, ultimately, was about this realisation; that the modern world can be duplicitous and vague, and it can be hard to know what’s happening. “We’ve begun to substitute real communities for online ones, but it can be hard to know what that really means, or what’s true in that process,” Shaw continues. “I think those feelings really made their way into the music this time.”

It’s a concept that comes through on the lead single ‘Youth Without Youth’, which is about the fleeting notion of childhood in the modern age. The song initially came into being a number of years ago, but back then, it had a very different form – it was very slow and ballad-y, nothing like the stomper we now hear on Synthetica. “It’s about this idea of childhood in a world where childhood is rare,” Shaw explains. “Kids are forced into an adult world quite prematurely – they’re exposed to a lot, they play games with weapons – so we decided that we wanted an arrangement to match that, we wanted music with a lot of aggression and anger. I remember when that was done, Emily decided on the title. She doesn’t like songs to be named after other things, and ‘Youth Without Youth’ is also the name of a Coppola film, but with this one she felt it had to be that way.”

Like the last Metric album, Synthetica is being independently released by the band on their own label, MMI – they even streamed the whole thing on Soundcloud in the lead-up to its release, in order to minimise online piracy. Running your own label is a lot more work, but Shaw tells me Metric would rather spend Wednesday, Thursday and Friday planning the release of their record than find out on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday that it all went wrong and now must be fixed. “It’s definitely more work, but it’s the right kind of work,” Shaw says. “The expenditure is massive, but the money comes back to you. It’s making the band the main employer, as opposed to the band being the employee of a label. When you make money for a record label, they spend some of it on you but keep a lot for themselves. Financially, it works out better this way – it’s just that we do a little more.”

What: Synthetica is out now on Metric Music International (MMI) through Create/Control
Where: The Hi-Fi
When: Thursday July 26
More: Also playing alongside Jack White, The Shins, Bloc Party, The Smashing Pumpkins, Lana Del Rey, Azealia Banks, Youth Lagoon and more at Splendour In The Grass, held from July 27–29 at Belongil Fields, Byron Bay