There’s nothing like secrecy to stoke some suspense. Metric have shied away from interviews and review copies of Art Of Doubt were sent out without a title or cover art. Over the past few weeks, a trickle of announcements and live footage tracks have been posted to their Twitter account, which in this age constitutes about as little fanfare as possible for a band with major label backing.
Here, Metric abandon the badly judged robo-pop of previous album Pagan In Vegas and plunge back into the stadium-friendly sound that broke them. It's glossy with big riffs, with technologically enhanced rock on Now Or Never Now, where twin synth lines coil together in alchemical ways as New Order once could. But most of all, it’s the unadorned, reverb-heavy guitar that opens Dark Saturday that sounds like an announcement to Metric’s base that the band you fell for the first time are back. There are a handful of anthems for doomed, disaffected youth, but the exact issues Metric are targeting are sometimes hazy, with metaphors in Die Happy like, "Still drinking that Kool-Aid like it's free". Guys, the problem with Kool-Aid was not the price.
Vagaries aside though, Metric have finally nailed their most urgent, energising work.
