Work on the New Metric Record

[Obese Chess]

Hey Justin,

I saw the Smashing Pumpkins this weekend, and, as I'm sure you're aware, Metric is the opener on this tour. I had never been a fan of their music, finding the instrumentation too sparse and the vocals too restrained for my liking - it wasn't bad, it just wasn't my taste - but I heard a few songs during their set that absolutely blew me away. The instrumentation was complex and layered, the groove was miles deep, and Emily was absolutely belting it out. I've listened to a shoddy cell-phone-cam bootleg of "Risk" a couple times a day since the show.

After some research, it appears that all the songs that really stood out to me during their set are ones from the new record, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little more about what the writing/recording/production process was like that makes this record sound so different to a casual listener like myself. Or, if I'm just nuts, feel free to say so.

Thanks!

 

[jmjbassplayer]

Glad to hear that this impression was made, thanks for sharing it. With this new album, I wanted to strip Metric down completely, then build them back up...very much as a band. With humans performing music together in great rooms. Which is exactly what we did. I felt that there were gaps in their recent recordings when it came to human interaction, expression, mistakes, visceral emotions, risk-taking, that kind of thing. So I created a new scenario for them where all of those things were more encouraged and brought to the fore. We'll see if people out there respond to the album, but at the risk of sounding very vain I think it's their finest work.

There's too many details as fas as the nuts-and-bolts of how this went down specifically. But there will be lots more on this in the future, in interviews, etc. I'll avoid giving up too much detail before it comes out.

This is a great band who wanted to push themselves to an area that they hadn't done previously, and they really did. Proud of them.

 

[Obese Chess]

I agree with your assessments of the previous records and that's what excites me so much about the new material I heard this past weekend. I think those kinds of things - the human elements of the music, or rather the elements of the humans making the music are easily lost, especially in bands that heavily use electronics in their work and especially with the dawn of accessible digital recording / quantized everything. It was nice to hear what they sounded like as a composite group of musicians and was really exciting for me as a listener who'd previously found a lot of their work to be, well, lacking those things. Thanks for your insight, I really appreciate it!