Metric have spoken about their collaboration with Lou Reed, which appears on their new studio album, Synthetica. The Canadian band will release their fifth full-length offering on June 18. The record contains a total of 11 tracks, and has been produced by the group's guitarist Jimmy Shaw. Reed app...
Metric have spoken about their collaboration with Lou Reed, which appears on their new studio album, Synthetica.
The Canadian band will release their fifth full-length offering on June 18. The record contains a total of 11 tracks, and has been produced by the group’s guitarist Jimmy Shaw.
Reed appears on a track called “The Wanderlust”, singing backing vocals. Singer Emily Haines told NME that she first became friendly with The Velvet Underground man when he quoted some of her lyrics from “Gimme Sympathy” back at her.
Asked how she met Reed, Haines replied: “I met him at this Neil Young tribute, I got introduced to him and I’d assumed he wouldn’t know who I was, but when we met he quoted some of my lyrics from ‘Gimme Sympathy’ so that was amazing. Then he invited me to Australia for this show and we did a couple of songs together.”
Speaking about the song they recorded together, Haines said: “We had this bit in ‘The Wanderlust’ which needed a back-up and I thought he’d be perfect, so I called him up and he said yes right away. He’s one of the finest songwriters ever and to have him on our record is a huge honour.”
Haines also spoke about the making of Synthetica and revealed that the band wrote around 20 songs for the record, but quickly realised which ones merited inclusion on the LP and which didn’t.
She said of this: “We didn’t much pressure on ourselves early on, we just let things come out and after a while it became pretty obvious what the strongest songs were. We had between 15 and 20 tracks and we went through them very democratically. At this stage in our careers, there’s no real problem with egos, we’re all quite good at letting things go.”
Metric will celebrate the album’s release with a short UK tour, playing a total of three shows in July.
The gigs begin in London at the O2 Shepherds Bush Empire on July 2, the band then play Manchester’s HMV Ritz on July 7 and finally Oxford’s O2 Academy on July 8.