Metric have been knowledgeable by the expansive, inclusionary high quality of Damaged Social Scene, a challenge that each Haines and Shaw have been concerned in — particularly across the time of their breakthrough You Forgot It In Individuals, which got here out a few yr earlier than Outdated World Underground. However Metric have been additionally extra populist in intention. They needed to make aggressively catchy songs that had one thing to say. The sound of Outdated World Underground is generally mangled, energetic synth-punk. Haines attributed a lot of the the album’s sonic course to its producer Michael Andrews, who had lately mined the ’80s for inspiration for the Donnie Darko soundtrack. The result’s brash, uncooked, and provocative — songs with serrated guitars and a locked-in rhythm part that’s offset by Haines’ spiky-sweet supply, which sounds as intimidating because it does approachable.

A seething frustration programs via their debut album, with songs that explicitly tackle how onerous it may be to take care of your dignity in an trade that encourages you to surrender what you consider in for fulfillment. That’s expressed on songs like “Lifeless Disco,” the place they flip their retro fascination right into a hook in regards to the unoriginality of a few of their friends: “All we get is useless disco, useless funk, useless rock and roll, transform/ The whole lot has been accomplished!” And on “The Listing,” which comes for loser A&R guys (“All dressed right down to catch a whiff of the excitement/ Smells just like the loss of life of the final nice trigger”) and ends with an feverish plea: “Calling from the subsequent lodge, can you set me on the checklist?”

Their grievances with the scene weren’t the one topics fueling Metric on the time. Outdated World can be a mirrored image of the fractured political local weather of the time, written and recorded within the years following 9/11 and within the lead-up to the Iraq struggle. Haines is deeply sardonic in regards to the modern state of politics. Album opener “IOU” is damning in its portrayal of the struggle: “Each 10-year-old enemy soldier/ Thinks falling bombs are taking pictures stars generally/ However she doesn’t make needs on them.” On “Succexy,” Haines rides an infectious groove to blunt and prescient ends: “All we do is speak, sit, change screens/ Because the homeland plans enemies.” They noticed the darkness on the horizon: Conventional strains of communication have been breaking down. Interpersonal relationships have been being changed by snaking cables. The whole lot was changing into extra related and everybody was changing into much less distinctive. The lovesick “Fight Child” sneaks in a dig at how progressive politics within the early ’00s had nothing on the radicals of previous generations: “Each mighty, gentle ’70s youngster beats me,” Haines sings, bemoaning a bygone time.

These songs have a story sweep, and Haines is a top-notch lyricist. The daughter of a poet, it’s clear that Haines grew up with an appreciation for the written phrase. Take the bratty “Moist Blanket,” the place Haines turns her ire on a lecherous hanger-on:

Falling for the creep, the physique leech, right here he comes
Vicious hypnosis, clenched fist saying it’s mistaken
To need greater than a people music
Beneath the shaker knit, he’s a brick wall
She hold falling for the trick, vegetarian sing-along
Give a bit of kick together with your tremendous thigh-high

Haines delivers her tangled-up poetry with a punchiness that makes full use of her star wattage, nonetheless nascent however growing rapidly. And a few of the most affecting moments on Outdated World Underground are additionally essentially the most understated, like the stunning blooping “Calculation Theme,” which harkens again to an age gone: “I want we have been farmers/ I want we knew the right way to develop candy potatoes and milk cows/ I want we have been lovers/ But it surely’s for the very best.” Or the slinking “On A Sluggish Evening,” a few pal swallowed up by the style world: “True stunning one/ What have you ever gone and accomplished?/ I can see all of your strikes are new/ Inform me, what did that salesman do to you?” On Metric’s early songs, Haines frames herself as out of step with the present time: an outsider questioning the place all of it went mistaken.

She opens Metric’s first album by growling out its titular query, a lamentation for a tradition that perhaps by no means actually existed however that the members of the Canadian band have been attempting to emulate anyway. Metric needed to embody an old-school cool that they felt had gotten misplaced over time, in favor of jockeying for report label offers and exclusionary scene politics. Along with her commanding presence, she offered herself as a rock star for the fashionable age. Haines noticed the facility in accessibility, in making music that spoke to youthful individuals with out speaking right down to them. “I see how 14-year-old ladies react to me and I feel I’m a very good function mannequin,” Haines mirrored in a 2004 interview. “Rock star, perhaps not, however I’m prepared to play with it for a short while, till my hair will get grey.”