Indie rock band Metric has just completed the Canadian leg of its tour in support of new album, Formentera, and with a U.S. tour start looming, vocalist Emily Haines and her bandmates are back in their new woodsy studio, “because we’re lunatics.”

After more than two years of a pandemic that had Haines, James Shaw, Joules Scott-Key and Joshua Winstead wondering if their band would outlast lockdowns, they’re not taking anything for granted. For the first year, Metric was split in two, with its rhythm section of Scott-Key and Winstead not able to get into Canada because of the country’s restrictions. Shaw and Haines bought an old church outside of Toronto that they converted into a recording studio.

The members’ first priority was taking care of the elderly and vulnerable people in their families. Haines lost someone in the initial wave. Then, their attention turned to keeping the band alive, “trying to do everything we could to come out of this and still have a career on the other side,” Haines said.

While the music industry is bouncing back, Haines remembers that for the last two years, there have been no guarantees for musicians. Even now, a positive test within anyone in a touring party can lead to postponements and income lost. With the entire industry shaken up, Metric focused on what it could control.

“All we can do is make the best possible music we can and try to be useful to people who are coming out of this experience around the world who are going to need some Metric tunes,” Haines said. “That was the only normalcy we could have. … We felt, of course, so fortunate that we could just hunker down and make it work.”

Eventually, the two Americans were able to join Haines and Shaw in their studio. They recorded Formentera, their first album since 2018’s Art of Doubt, in the church studio, sharing the same space, rather than in their own recording booths.

“For me as a singer, I always struggled with that like fishbowl feeling of doing vocals in the booth. It’s always like everyone’s on the other side of the glass talking and ordering take out, and it’s just so weird,” she said. “A lot of the vocals on the album are actually the first vocals I sang in the writing, and furthermore, all of them were done within a few feet of Jimmy just sitting there wearing headphones.”

Metric named Formentera, its eighth studio LP, after a Balearic island off the coast of Ibiza after randomly flipping through the pages of a travel book. The name represents more of a metaphoric escape from the reality of COVID-19 rather than the physical destination.

The album includes the requisite amount of acerbic and existentialist wit that Haines has wrapped into her songwriting for years, on tracks like 10-minute-topping “Doomscroller,” “All Comes Crashing” and “What Feels Like Eternity,” but wraps it up in a tropical bow—a light at the end of the tunnel.

Haines said she views “Doomscroller” as the band’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The opus includes numerous movements that were neither separate song ideas tied together nor a singular spark that came fully formed at once. Over those 10 minutes, it journeys from panic-inducing throbbing to a more wide-open and soothing place.

“It’s really fun to play live, actually,” Haines said. “If we’ve done it right, you’re not sitting there looking at your watch. You’re in it. It’s a feeling, and you surpass time, hopefully.”

RIFF: For an album named for what you’ve described as a dream destination or an escape, there sure is a lot of doom and gloom happening within the songs. Why did you go for such a dichotomy?

Emily Haines: Have you ever seen Terry Gilliam’s film “Brazil?” Kind of a similar concept there, where it’s in a dystopian sort of dire setting, where there seem to be increasingly alarming reports of the disintegration of civilization, as it can feel at certain times between concerns about climate, obviously the pandemic, but also social unrest and the rifts—the increasing polarization of people around the world; the questions of where you fit in that, can you do anything to help, can you be of any use to the world? …

Brazil’s a place, but in the film, it’s this imaginary kind of melody, like that [theme] song. Off he goes in his mind to this version of himself where he’s sort of a superhero so he can function in this other reality. It’s certainly a bit of a trope and something I’ve recognized in cinema and literature elsewhere.

So when it happened very naturally with us, opening this book to that page on Formentera, more  as inspiration than anything, to be like, “We’ve got to mentally check out here because we’re tripping pretty hard,” as the snow’s coming up to your ears, a couple of years into being locked away for people who are used to traveling the world professionally.

Not only did that song end up lyrically becoming a centerpiece, but that concept of creating a place in your mind, the sonic oasis, that developed around it. It was really a natural process. It wasn’t like a big conceptual thing. I don’t feel like there’s any more doom and gloom than usual for me, lyrically. At least with the flow of this album, in terms of the chronology of it, you get a redemption, sort of like a party ending. You make it to Formentera—the song and the place in your mind. And then for the rest of the record, you’re kind of reckoning and feeling good and coming out of it.

I know from speaking to you and Jimmy that you don’t really care about what other people think of your music and that you write for yourselves. But writing a 10-minute opening song like “Doomscroller” feels like a challenge to listeners.

Emily Haines: I’ll just speak for myself. I do care what people think, but not in the way of trying to conform to it. It’s a conversation, and I think it’s interesting because we’re coming up on the 20-year anniversary of our first album. You listen to Old World [Underground, Where Are You Now?], and we’re not pulling any punches. Listen to the first song on that record. What we’ve been doing since the beginning is jumping between genres, like singing about a “female enemy soldier” or something. Like, what? It’s not like we were this totally distinct, genre-specific compact little nutshell of pop or something, and then we became something else. We’ve always been doing that.

In many ways, I feel like it’s a kind of part of the relationship with our fans and people who listen to our music … to do something like “Doomscroller.” Pushing ourselves always is kind of us being on brand.

But in the case of that song, though, kind of similar with the rest of record, it wasn’t a conceptual sitting back and stroking our beards, like, “Let’s do this big intellectual thing.”

Jimmy and [Metric long-time collaborator] Liam [O’Neil, formerly of the Stills] had come up with this piece of music. I wrote to that, and then the feeling kept evolving. It was like, “Oh, I’m hearing this next section, and this next section!” We just followed it ‘til it felt complete, and it was then that we were like, “Oh, oops! It’s 10 and a half minutes!” And then, we’re like, “Ah, fuck it!”

Formentera is symbolic for this album and for the band. What’s your actual haven, where you like to escape or one day hope to?

Emily Haines: In the past, always, that’s how I would write. I’d go off to Nicaragua, Buenos Aires or somewhere as remote as possible. Because I couldn’t this time, it’s kind of this other layer on the whole idea of Formentera. Now I feel as though we have kind of manifested this—I use that term very lightly—so it’s kind of a big change. A lot changed in my life during the pandemic. I was living in L.A. before that, and I just felt like I was always trying to put roots down, and not accepting that I already had roots; kind of fighting the roots. I don’t know if that’s because I was born in India, but I always felt like I’m supposed to go back out into the world; I’m not supposed to just be in Canada.

It was really cool to realize, at some point, there’s no point in fighting and just appreciating that I have this place. It’ll be interesting to see, for the next record, if I feel compelled … to go back to those patterns of disappearing somewhere, or if something has changed and now, with this beautiful studio and this concept that you can create the oasis in your mind, [I stay]. We’ll see. For now, I feel like that oasis is … our studio, for sure.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.