Credit: Norman WongMetric's sixth album, Pagans in Vegas, won't be released until September, but the band has already begun working on their seventh record. While they were on tour with Imagine Dragons, which just wrapped up over the weekend, Metric started recording what they're tentatively calling "The Road Record."
"We're going into our favorite, dream studios around the country on our days off and recording the next segment of the music," frontwoman Emily Haines tells ABC Radio. Those dream studios included Nashville's Blackbird Studio and Steve Albini's Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.
While they went on their own version of Foo Fighters' Sonic Highways -- which also featured a stop in Electrical Audio -- Metric wanted to create the "counterpart to the glitzy Pagans sound," which was in part influenced by the German electronic band Kraftwerk. "Cascades," a single from Pagans in Vegas, is one of the most purely electronic songs Metric has ever recorded, but as Haines explains, "The Road Record" is not that.
"It's all four off us playing live in the room, same time, one take approach to music," Haines says. "So it's the complete opposite of the highly treated, cerebral Kraftwerk world."
While recording a follow-up to an album that hasn't been released yet may seem non-traditional, as an independent band, Metric found that being able to work on "The Road Record" was one of the benefits of being their own record label.
"There are a lot of pains of being independent, and one of the joys is that we can do exactly what we want," Haines tells ABC Radio. "So we're trying to just embrace that and follow the creative process as much as possible, as opposed to any other logic that would probably help us if we used it."
Pagans in Vegas will be released on September 18.
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