Metric Formentera LP

After an almost 25 year history, Metric reigns as an iconic, beloved and critically acclaimed indie rock band, staying true to their roots while at the same time breaking through to the mainstream. Their 2022 album Formentera is the follow-up to 2018's Art of Doubt.

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. Named for an idyllic island near Ibiza off the coast of Spain, Formentera is a place that, for Metric, only existed 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. This is the setting where the band's eighth album took shape.

Metric's sound is both genre-defying and genre-defining. Emily Haines, Jimmy Shaw, bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott Key started playing together in NYC in 2001. They are just getting started.

The group's pulsating synthesizers and looming guitars carry new-wave urgency into the 21st century.

...their most wide-reaching effort yet, with the arrangements shifting from the sounds of bedroom pop at its most isolated at one moment, then bursting with orchestral grandeur the next. The contrast between tinny drum machines and ringing piano chords, swelling synths and overloaded circuitry, clanging guitars and bubbling bass lines can be breathtaking from song to song....The whole record is pulsing with [energy and emotion] and comes across like the group's most important album, only without the pretension that kind of thing often entails. It's more that Formentera captures the warring emotions, steady fears, and crushing uncertainty of the era it was made in and delivers it all wrapped up in triumphant and true songs that one will want to spin again and again.