‘Thuggish’ punk band gets melodic
Metz’s new album finds band moving into more melodic and cinematic spaces
Even the most committed of brassknuckled career thugs must eventually grow weary of simply beating people’s brains out for a living.
The members of Metz are not and have never been actual thugs, of course — at least not to this writer’s knowledge — but there was definitely something so wilfully (albeit artfully) thuggish about the Toronto trio’s earliest output that the band remains at or very near top of the list among contemporary punk acts guaranteed to beat your brains out if you consent to lock yourself in a room with it.
And, yes, Metz is still absolutely guaranteed to beat your brains out because that’s what Metz has reliably been doing in Toronto for more than 15 years now, since well before its reputation for brutality caught the fancy of the folks at Seattle’s iconic Sub Pop Records label and a stable cult following worldwide with its walloping debut, “Metz,” in 2012.
Surely, though, it must grow more difficult to summon some of the darker and more primal energies as time goes on and the mollifying effects of, say, encroaching middle age and parenthood set in — guitarist/vocalist Alex Edkins and bassist Chris Slorach have been dads for some time now, although drummer Hayden Menzies contents himself with doting on “an old pooch” in his private moments.
“I don’t know about that,” countered Edkins last week near the end of a month-long North American tour in support of April’s juicy “Up on Gravity Hill” LP.
“You see all these old metal bands doing it for 30 years, so I think you can still play excruciatingly heavy music at an older age. But, frankly, I’m just not as interested in that anymore.
“I do feel the need to move forward and see what we can do in a way that scratches that itch for the three of us and hopefully our fans, too, while still expanding on what we’ve done. I think the three of us have a distinct ‘thing,’ so it’s gonna sound like us. But I think our songwriting and our production have improved over time, and we’re excited about that and where it could lead.”
Hence “Up On Gravity Hill,” which arrived this past April after a four-year layover between albums and introduced us to the deepest and most nuanced version of Metz yet.
You see all these old metal bands doing it for 30 years, so I think you can still play excruciatingly heavy music at an older age. But, frankly, I’m just not as interested in that anymore.
ALEX EDKINS GUITARIST/ VOCALIST
Flush with unexpected hooks and harmonies, and long on grooves that flex and swagger rather than indulging in straight-up assault and battery, the new record finds the band moving into more melodic and cinematic head spaces that allow listeners some room to breathe and gather their thoughts before the whip comes down.
There are even strings by goto local indie arranger Owen Pallett here and there, and the Metz version of a “power ballad” in the form of album closer “Light Your Way Home,” which features angelic guest vocals from Black Mountain’s Amber Webber.
The vibe is much less Jesus Lizard and Big Black these days, in short, more akin to Fugazi circa “In on the Kill Taker” or the driven shoegaze of early Swervedriver.
It’s cool to hear Metz growing up, although Metz itself wasn’t entirely certain of the path the new record should take when it went into the studio in Rhode Island with mixer/engineer Seth Manchester, and cautiously decided to feel around in the dark and let the chips fall where they may.
“We didn’t flesh the songs out as much as we had maybe before and we left some things unanswered,” said Edkins. “And that was cool. We were kind of open to the idea of ‘Well, I don’t really know how that’s gonna turn out, but let’s see. Let’s find out.’ There was a time when we would have been way too uptight for that, but now there’s a certain amount of confidence that we’ll get to where we want to be with some time put in and an open mind.
“It’s like that famous David Bowie line: ‘When you’re out in the water a little bit further than you think you should be, that’s when you know you’re in the right spot.’ We never really thought we’d be doing something like this but, at the same time, we’re not really OK with doing the same thing. So I’m glad we did it. And, thankfully, the response has been really good. Maybe we didn’t know it, but it seems like a lot of the diehards and the people who’ve been supporting us since Day 1 actually wanted this from us.”
Contributing to the fact that Metz feels pretty good about where it is these days, too, was some time apart. Some of that came from the enforced solitude of COVID-19 lockdown, but some from the members of Metz finding satisfaction in taking a break from each other doing things outside of Metz.
Edkins branched out into fizzy power-pop with his garage-y Weird Nightmare side project in 2022, took a hypnotic electro excursion with Graham Walsh of Holy F- as Noble Rot on 2023’s Heavenly Bodies and did some film scoring on the side. Slorach signed on with nebulous Detroit hardcore faction the Armed for a bit. Artschool grad Menzies dove into painting for awhile.
The wee hiatus allowed the band to appreciate the “special chemistry” Metz shares, and find renewed enthusiasm in exploring ways to grow and mature within the pummelling format it has established over the past couple of decades.
The growth and maturity displayed on “Up On Gravity Hill” has, in turn, forced the threesome to become an even more devastating live band on this recent tour. Which, Edkins concedes, has been “amazing but exhausting.”
“It’s been interesting playing these songs live,” he said. “They absolutely translate, but it’s taking every bit of our abilities to make it work. Which is pretty cool and definitely necessary, too, when we’ve been a band this long. A little challenge here and there, I think, is healthy. I think it’s shown more so our capabilities as three musicians on this tour.
“We’ve only just physically recovered, though … We used to have a rule about two weeks being the cut-off (for tours) and we totally broke our rule this time. We’re gonna break it one more time on our Europe run and then I think we’re gonna have to rethink the length of these trips.”