Metric Announce Plans to Self-Release April Album "Fantasies"

It's been four years since Canadian indie rockers Metric released the stellar Live It Out, and now the quartet is announcing it'll return with its fourth full-length, Fantasies — which will be available for pre-order on their Website I Love Metric on March 2nd, and in stores April 14th. Fans who reserve their copy in advance online will instantly receive an MP3 of first single "Help I'm Alive" (hear it after the jump), which has already bumped Kings of Leon from the top of the Canadian charts.

In a video interview posted on the band's site, frontwoman Emily Haines says she did her "simplest and clearest" writing in Buenos Aires — where she traveled to escape the din of new music coming out of New York and the U.K. — including the first song she penned there, "Help I'm Alive." Guitarist Jimmy Shaw, who co-produced the record with Gavin Brown, says in a statement that he had a specific sound in mind ("really big and really dreamy"). After meeting with record labels big and small, Haines adds, "We just said, 'Oh fuck it, lets gamble,' took a deep breath and decided to put this record out worldwide our own way." Ultimately, that meant having Last Gang release the album in Canada and Arts & Crafts do the same in Mexico. The band assembled their own distribution for the States, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. "We might go down in flames, or it might be the best move ever," Shaw says. "Either way it will have been on our terms, and that for us is success."

Producer Nigel Godrich has also requested that Metric contribute unreleased track "Black Sheep" to the forthcoming Scott Pilgrim VS. The World, a film by Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright that's due next year. The band — Haines, Shaw, bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key — recorded the LP in Toronto and outside Seattle, and mixed it with Grammy-nominated John O'Mahony at New York's Electric Lady. The 10-track album also includes "Satellite Mind," "Blindness," "Gimme Sympathy" and "Gold Guns Girls."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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