THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Formentera, Metric’s eighth studio album, is named for an idyllic island near Ibiza off the coast of Spain — a place which only existed for Metric on a page in a “dream destinations” travel book that lay open on a desk in the new recording studio that guitarist Jimmy Shaw built in 2020, in a rural hamlet north of Toronto.
“We had been living in our imaginations for a long time, because we couldn’t physically go anywhere else,” explains Shaw. “When you listen to the album from beginning to end, you start with this immediate feeling of tension building, of being stuck in a loop, and then there’s this intense release that happens … you’re swept off your feet into the title track Formentera and it’s like you escaped.”
Emily Haines continues: “We came to this realization that it wasn’t even about an actual place anymore — it was about creating an escape for yourself in your mind because you’re powerless over so many things.”
The vinyl artwork for Formentera includes a motto that sums up the past few years: This Is What Happened. It’s an understatement that manages to say everything. Even real places become imaginary when they are so far out of reach.
The album was preceded by several singles, including All Comes Crashing — which quickly became their fastest record to cross 1 million streams — and Doomscroller, the epic openier that also serves as a thematic centrepiece to Formentera. The latter track — which sits at over 10 minutes — is a rollercoaster of emotions, taking the listener through a “high-speed chase through the wild terrain of modern life.”
Metric’s sound is both genre-defying and genre-defining. Haines, Shaw, bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott Key started playing together in N.Y.C. in 2001. They are just getting started.”
