Metric - Romanticize The Dive

It’s not often a band admit to having been inspired by their experiences on a nostalgia tour to work more of their past into their present-day work, but that appears to be the basic story behind Metric’s tenth studio album; after playing their 2009 record ‘Fantasies’ in full across their native Canada last year, they then set about reassembling the production team behind that record and its (arguably superior) 2012 follow-up ‘Synthetica’. Suggestions that this might be some cynical attempt to recapture the glory days are tempered by the thematic material covered on ‘Romanticize the Dive’, which looks back on the band’s younger years with an affecting tenderness. This isn’t them superficially cashing in on a new generation’s fascination with ‘indie sleaze’; it’s the sound of songwriting duo Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw bridging the gap between who they were then and who they are now.

Sonically, they do that by leaning into the fundamentals. ‘Fantasies’ was a record that perhaps tried to mask its poppiness in places, with spiky riffs or echo-laden percussion, but on the standouts here, like ‘Tremolo’ and ‘Crash Together’, the hooks and melodies are front and centre. The latter of these two is an affecting love letter to the next generation of girls from Emily - almost a spiritual sequel to Broken Social Scene’s ‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’, on which she sang lead vocals over two decades ago. That band will tour the UK with Metric later this year, on a jaunt that should prove, as ‘Romanticize the Dive’ does, that past and present can - and perhaps should - inform one another.