Romanticize the Dive

🗣️ <i>The sound of a band coming to terms with their 25-year legacy but refusing to be defined by it.</i> Metric’s 10th album arrives 25 years after the Toronto indie icons recorded their first, and the passage of time is certainly not lost on lead singer Emily Haines. “I was a starving artist, but I was fearless,” she reminisces amid the neon glow of the opening <b>“Victim of Luck”</b> before adding, “Now I don’t know what we are.” <i>Romanticize the Dive</i> is the sound of a band coming to terms with the fact that they’re now old enough to be a cog in the 2000s-nostalgia industrial complex, but refusing to be defined by their past. A quarter century into their career, Metric are still coming up with novel ways to reformulate their sound, to the point where typical descriptors like “synth-pop” or “dance rock” feel ill-suited to encompass the Lana Del Rey-goes-Madchester fever dream of <b>“Tremolo”</b> or the operatic post-punk pageantry of <b>“Antigravity”</b>. But for Metric, the evolution is as much philosophical as musical: While the strobe-lit New Orderisms of <b>“Crush Forever”</b> and the LCD-like stutter-funk of <b>“Loyal”</b> hit all the right indie-sleaze pleasure points, the songs are ultimately open-hearted celebrations of long-term romance from a band who are happy to put their all-night-party days behind them.