Coming off the success of its fourth album, Fantasies, and the radio staple "Help I'm Alive," Canadian rock quartet Metric has announced a new batch of fall North American tour dates. Frontwoman Emily Haines and the boys of Metric (guitarist Jimmy Shaw, bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key) will begin their road trip in Buffalo, New York on November 16 and continue to weave their way throughout the States, making stops in Portland, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Austin and other cities before wrapping things up in Dallas on December 2. Metric will be unveiling additional dates in the near future, and fans who want to see them live can check online for Metric tickets.
Following in the footsteps of bands like Radiohead and Pearl Jam, Metric opted to release its most recent effort, Fantasies, without the help of a record label. Metric made fans wait four years for the album, the follow-up to the lauded Live It Out, and released Fantasies on their Website, I Love Metric, prior to its arrival in stores this past April. In a video interview posted on I Love Metric, Haines revealed that she did the "simplest and clearest" writing for the album while escaping from the fast-paced music scenes in the U.K. and New York in Buenos Aires. Among the tracks Haines penned in Argentina was "Help I'm Alive," which landed in the Top 40 on Billboard's Rock Songs chart and remains omnipresent on rock radio, with the lyrics "Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer/Hard to be soft, tough to be tender/Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train" remaining in listeners' heads long after the song is over.
Also in the interview, Haines said that the band initially tried on labels of all sizes before deciding to go it alone recalling, "We just said, "Oh f***it, let's gamble,' took a deep breath and decided to put this record out worldwide our own way." As a result, Last Gang released the album in Metric's native Canada while Arts & Crafts followed suit in Mexico. As for the States, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Metric forged its own distribution. Prior to the experimental release of the 10-track album Shaw said, "We might go down in flames, or it might be the best move ever. Either way it will have been on our terms, and that for us is success." The move proved to be a good one, as Metric sold more albums within eight weeks of the release of Fantasies than in the previous four years since Live It Out arrived! For a band to score its breakthrough using the self-released method is practically unprecedented, as Radiohead, for example, was already one of the biggest bands to emerge out of the U.K. when it historically released In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-like download on its website.
Metric recorded Fantasies in studios in Toronto and the outskirts of Seattle, mixing the album with Grammy-nominated John O'Mahony at Electric Lady in New York. In an interview with The Victoria Advocate, Haines said that the making of Fantasies felt like a natural progression for her as a songwriter and for the band as a whole, revealing "Our goal is to never repeat ourselves. I know it sounds a lot different from Live It Out, but our first album sounds a lot different from Live it Out, so for us it feels like a natural progressions, but we're always pushing ourselves to try and create something new that doesn't sound completely unrecognizable to the people who have always been with us."
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