by LORRAINE CARPENTER

With a new album in stores this week, Metric are deeply entrenched in promo duties. There are scores of shows on their schedule, reams of media reports being written and recorded, videos being made.

Singer/keyboardist Emily Haines doesn’t care that their new video, a grisly, artsy homage to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, won’t reel in the masses, but Metric has made inroads outside the indie world over the past two years, touring the planet in support of their smart and catchy debut LP, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? It doesn’t hurt that Haines and guitarist James Shaw are members of Toronto’s celebrated supergroup Broken Social Scene, having toured with them extensively and appeared on their breakthrough LP, You Forgot It In People, and its upcoming eponymous follow-up.

Meanwhile the new Metric record, Live It Out, reveals more bite behind the band’s bark, with Shaw’s tougher guitars and drummer Joules Scott-Key and bassist Josh Winstead’s more assertive rhythms backing Haines’s increasingly varied, complex lyrical palette, which ranges from nuanced musings about career musicianship to potential sticker slogans like “I fought the war and the war won!”

Apart from reflecting their growth as a team and experience on the road, the record’s sound and subject matter are wrapped up in the band’s latest cross-border, cross-continental relocation from L.A. to Toronto (though Scott-Key and Winstead stayed in California). The Mirror spoke to Haines, a dual U.S./Canadian citizen, about Metric’s nomadic path.

Mirror: So you’re back in Toronto.

Emily Haines: Yeah, James and I came back on U.S. election day, coincidentally. I don’t know how long it’ll last, but it’s been good while we’ve been here.

M: What about the new studio?

EH: Throughout the last tour, James found all this great vintage gear in pawn shops across the country, so we brought it all back and set up our own studio, which was really a lifetime goal. It’s called the International Chemical Workers Union ’cause it’s an old office building and that’s written on one of the doors. We like the idea of being in solidarity with the proletariat (laughs).

M: I understand you’ve spent a lot of time in Montreal over the past year, and recorded part of the album here.

EH: We always do some work there. I don’t think we could make records without Montreal—it’s an inspiring place. James and I first collaborated on music when I was going to Concordia, even though we met [in Toronto]. He’s also been working with the Lovely Feathers [in Montreal]. He produced their record.

M: MTV.com recently commented that you’ve written the “straight-up love song” you said you never would. I don’t know how straight up “Too Little Too Late” is—

EH: Right, with [quoting lyrics] “a live wire in the bath.” It cracks me up that I’m being held to my word from that one interview when I said I wouldn’t write a love song. I’m amazed that anyone cares, but that’s great! I guess my justification is that the song was written long, long before I ever made that statement. In fact, I wrote it in Montreal 10 years ago, so I’m off the hook.

With Lovely Feathers and the Most Serene Republic at Club Soda on Saturday, Oct. 1, 8 p.m., all ages, sold out

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