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Metric: A Rock Band Declares Independence

Metric's new album, its second on the band's own label, is titled <em>Synthetica</em>. Left to right: Joshua Winstead, Emily Haines, James Shaw, Joules Scott-Key.
Brantley Gutierrez
Metric's new album, its second on the band's own label, is titled Synthetica. Left to right: Joshua Winstead, Emily Haines, James Shaw, Joules Scott-Key.

Metric has long been identified as an indie-rock band, but it recently embraced the "indie" part of that descriptor in a big way.

For their last album together, the band's members formed their own company — Metric Music International — to distribute the record, organize a tour and handle promotion without a label's support. The result was the biggest album of Metric's career: Fantasies sold half a million copies worldwide.

"The only fundamental and life-changing difference is there's one band at the center of that whole organization — and it's us," singer Emily Haines tells NPR's Laura Sullivan.

Metric has just released its second self-distributed album, Synthetica. Haines says the title is a term that wouldn't go away during the writing process.

"When I was still working on Fantasies, I had kind of concocted this character, this sort of robot, soulless woman who I named 'Synthetica' — someone who was so free of flaws that she made being human seem repulsive," Haines says.

"We started to develop other ideas of what the word meant to us: the idea of what's artificial versus what is real, and sort of imagining landscapes, even, of a place called 'Synthetica,' " she adds. "The word almost sounded like the music we wanted to make."

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The independent journalism and non-commercial programming you rely on every day is in danger.

If you’re reading this, you believe in trusted journalism and in learning without paywalls. You value access to educational content kids love and enriching cultural programming.

Now all of that is at risk.

Federal funding for public media is under threat and if it goes, the impact to our communities will be devastating.

Together, we can defend it. It’s time to protect what matters.

Your voice has protected public media before. Now, it’s needed again. Learn how you can protect the news and programming you depend on.