Metric Tickets

After ten albums and 25 years as a band, Metric’s day-one commandments still hold up: call it like you see it, live how you wanna live and dance away the sickness. 

Is there a cooler person than Emily Haines? The singer inspired the character of Envy Adams from the Scott Pilgrim universe. She was mates with Lou Reed, designed a leather jacket, and it’s her iconic voice on ‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ (and other Broken Social Scene tunes). Her main project, Metric, has been one of the most consistent and true-to-itself pillars of the indie rock world for more than 25 years. 

Metric formed as the duo of Haines and James Shaw in 1998. Though hailing from Toronto, they came up in New York’s fertile Meet Me In The Bathroom era, their seven-room Williamsburg loft home to Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. This is where they picked up drummer Joules Scott-Key and bassist Joshua Winstead. But they’re equally entwined with the spellbinding scene in their hometown, which includes Feist, Broken Social Scene, and Stars – the latter two tour with them this year. They’ve been based in LA off and on, and cropped up in Twilight, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (‘Black Sheep’ was lip-synced by Brie Larson), and Haines even starred in the 2004 film Clean.

Through it all, Metric have never gone more than three years without putting out a record, and never signed to a major label. “The reason we’re able to be doing, I think, our best work 20 years in is because we are able to own our own music and own our own existence,” Haines said in 2023. She’s often decried big business in music and capitalism more generally. See ‘Dead Disco’ for the former and barbs like “Invasion’s so succexy… Let’s drink to the military” for the latter. Both come from their 2003 debut, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, an astonishingly fully-formed album that was actually the second one they recorded. 

Two years prior, Haines and Shaw made Grow Up and Blow Away, but the label they were on was going through a messy, drawn-out sale, delaying the release by six years. This experience only cemented the band’s desire for independence. And they’ve never lost sight of that: during the pandemic, they bought a church, built a studio, and made the two-parter Formentera and Formentera II in isolation. Even when they put a foot wrong – an inevitability over such a winding career – they know how to recalibrate. After a difficult period around the release of 2015’s Pagans in Vegas – "there wasn't a lot of vibing happening," Shaw later reflected in an interview – Metric made sure the follow-up, Art of Doubt, was all about band-in-the-room immediacy and connection, a return to form. This is also when Haines codified the formidable aesthetic she dubs “Iggy with tits.” 

Metric’s back catalogue is a treasure trove of great records that gently recalibrate the band’s sound while always galvanizing around the core of Haines’ spiky yet sleek vocal. Live It Out 2005 is all scratchy guitar fuzz and raw production. Fantasies is their most hit-packed and widescreen, stadium-ready but still pumping with life. Romanticize the Dive, coming April 2026, is their tenth full length, led by ‘Victim of Luck’. It’s about “the romance of a less than perfect life,” Haines wrote on Instagram. “I just wanted to reclaim the levity of a life in music. Metric know to throw a party. You come to our shows, and it’s really fucking fun because it’s real,” she told NME. For a band that inexhaustibly confronts the inequities in their scene and the systems we live in, a party is not only well-deserved but essential. And so it makes sense for us to abide by the well-aged instructions of ‘Calculation Theme’ from their first album: “I’m sick, you’re tired, let’s dance.”