Metric Albums- An Unhinged Ranking (2024)

Hello Friend,

I was certain earlier this week I would be drafting my response to HotD and the beginning of dragon warfare, my love of dragons was bested by my obsession for Metric.

Since I broke my finger (details upcoming in my Field Notes newsletter teehee) I’ve decided to declutter my phone and apps including consolidating and reimagining some Spotify playlists. While browsing my saved albums I realized how formative and fostering Emily Haines’s voice has been in inspiring my music taste and style of writing, especially as vocalist in the duo-to-band project, Metric.

Flip through my CD book from elementary school: Cat Power, Cocteau Twins, Mazzy Star… Shakira. And Metric.

(Laundry Service is a gem).

Top of my personal taste making tributary is “Help I’m Alive.” It captured a claustrophobic and dreadful feeling I was early to of having to be public and be a performative version of myself.

The eye, an audience, my worst fear, put to a few simple phrases and a heartbeat.

Even as Fantasies and Live it Out got left behind in my repertoire as popular music mainstreamed successfully into my profile, I realized the “paths in the sky” as the music video for “Breathing Underwater” played over my mom’s shoulder one day in 2012. Again, that feeling of my internal world as a song.

But I wondered, despite attachments, what are Metric’s best gifts to their fanbase? So, I made my way through their discography excluding their participation in the soundtrack for Cosmopolis which I’ve never seen, and Synthetica Reflections which is gorgeous instrumental narrative, but I lack the sophistication to rate at all let alone among their more traditional discography.

Okay, here is my unhinged and unprofessional ranking from most favorite to least.

My recommended Metric listening experience! Maybe something to listen to while you read?

1. Art of Doubt (2018)

   This one got me through the college bubble years and kept my flame alive. Art of Doubt is an exemplary album in terms of syntax, form, style but damn it’s just got a finger on the pulse of a contemporary heartbeat — a longing and familiarity to cram life between darkness. It’s a perfect album to throw your headphones on and mean-girl-walk to work, throw back on at home and have the last song “No Lights on the Horizon” offer some sympathy and softness to your evening.

2. Fantasies (2009)

   Fantasies seems to be the great equalizer in the Metric-verse. “Help I’m Alive” is unnerving, focused, and vulnerable. The singer offers us a glimpse into her reflections; it’s a life not unfamiliar to mine, likely not unfamiliar to yours — “I get wherever I’m going. I get whatever I need.” “Gold Guns Girls” is a badass, sexy anthem for the driven and hardworking. “Is it ever gonna be enough?” Fantasies is a sentimental favorite, sure, but it is also the album that first comes to mind when I think of the band.

3. Live it Out (2005)

   I was surprised that “Poster of a Girl” and “Moster Hospital” still packed enough of a punch for me to merit Live it Out in the top three. Dreamy rock with perhaps a London bubblegum edge, this one is just fun, sexy, and powerful. Go listen, don’t let “Empty” fool you.

4. Pagans in Vegas (2015)

   Apologies in advance to the loyal Metric fans for how much I like this one. What is so wrong with Depeche Mode? I understand a reserve for the 80s influence and even the 80s simplicity, but I appreciate the stripped songs and the melodrama they muscle. I mean, come on, “Cascades,” a 5-minute robot trance about loving life will have any cynic disassociating happily through the future we’ve found ourselves in. Pagans in Vegas reads as a love letter to me. While not my favorite, a notable song, “The Shade” has one of my favorite lyrics in all of their catalogue:

   I'm following the sun

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   That's setting in the West

   We're floating on a bed of fading lights

   A canopy of trees

   Bears witness to the breeze

   I'm falling like a feather, soft and light.

I know, take a shot every time Metric mentions “the west” but the imagery and space I get in the landscape of those lines is so valuable to me.

5. Grow Up and Blow Away (2007)

   Historical. Kidding, but this was the original project between Haines and Shaw that went unreleased until Metric as we know the group with Winstead and Scott-Key came to be. The duo Metric however hold the true source of Metric’s motif — the connection and interpretation between Haines and Shaw and Haines’s special voice. “White Gold” is a masterclass in lyricism. The piano itself moves me through imagination, fantasy, and innermost truth. Oh, and “Hardwire”! Again, Haines’s intuitive vocal coloring, what many reviewers and journalists have ascribed a “shimmer,” is what makes this album definitively Metric.

6. Formentera II (2023)

   I’m a year overdue to this one but I’m happy that it stacks up against its archival heritage. “Go Ahead and Cry” is a human ballad that would have really accompanied my read of The Tide Will Erase All by Justin Hellstrom. Metric so often helps confront the discomfort of mortality and afterlife and legacy and this song as this time in the world offers grounding through revelatory musicality.

7. Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (2003)

   I went into this side quest desperately wanting to bring this original to the top. My adoration for this album simply went up against the growth in the succession, Old World Underground falls into my lower rankings with grace. Still, “Succexy” and “Love is a Place” introduced the range and duality Metric has proved capable of balancing with action and submission — Not left behind, no one had to go solo, they’ve played the game to win.

8. Synthetica (2012)

   It’s a great work. Synthetica is thoughtful and subtle like no other album and the namesake track is now in my top 10 favorite Metric songs, but as a whole the album did not encourage my heart to soar. The pacing is intentional I know but it was too level and became stagnant in my listen. “Breathing Underwater” is of course a beautiful song and vulnerable as ever.

9. Formentera (2022)

   I do like Formentera, and it was a perfect album to release during the pandemic. Metric did not dissuade their audience from their isolated states but met where we were all at offering instead escape within the impending-ness of a still world. To hold higher hopes and safeguard your mental fortitude by preserving your energy and intelligence. I am impacted by this album but of the cannon I do not think anything aside from Doomscroller essential to a Metric listening experience.

HONORABLE MENTION- The Queen That Should Have Been

“Love is a Place” should truly place Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? in the top 3 simply for how Haines sings “nothing but blue skies.” But since this didn’t seem like I even attempted objectivity I scaled back.

Hence, my playlist title.

Thank you for reading Fad Fix Review! A place for my obsessions to be ours!

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