“Indie sleaze” is not a thing.
Allow me to say it louder for the people in the back… “INDIE SLEAZE” IS NOT A THING!
Maybe my slightly younger cohorts in Substackland would like to correct me, but when The Strokes (can we just focus on their music here?) and Interpol and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were kicking off the downtown “rock is back” era and bands like Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party carried it on into the mid-2000s, not once did I hear someone refer to the moment as “indie sleaze.” But since about 2021, thanks to Instagram and TikTok and the never-ending lazy hunt for clicks, “indie sleaze” is now the fashion-inspired shorthand for everything from LCD Soundsystem to Peaches to MGMT to The Libertines (actually, I might grant you that last one). Gretchen may not have been able to make “fetch” happen, but post-pandemic online culture definitely made “indie sleaze” happen.
Canadian band Metric came up in this era starting in the early aughts Toronto music scene, hometown of lead singer Emily Haines and guitarist James Shaw (both of whom also played with the Toronto collective Broken Social Scene). They developed a sound that combined indie rock, new wave synth, dance-punk, and post-punk, a combination that in hindsight seems tailor-made to be retroactively labeled “indie sleaze.” Shit, maybe Gen Z has a point. Please don’t tell them, they already think they know everything.
Anyway, Metric also spent time in Brooklyn because everyone in a creative field at that time – from musicians to writers to artists to artisanal yogurt makers – spent time in Brooklyn. But in their Juno Award-winning hearts, Metric are a cool Canadian band.
In fact, Metric are so Canadian that one of their songs was used in the second-most-Canadian movie of all time, after 1983’s Strange Brew (I said at the start I’m a Gen X-er, dammit). Freeze! Vegan police!
Metric are back with their 10th studio album, Romanticize the Dive, their first since 2023’s Formentera II.
While I admit I haven’t kept up with their last few releases, the new album both gives a sense of where they are now and is a reminder of where they were in the mid-to-late 2000s. It’s the best form of nostalgia – nodding to the past while also being wholly in the present.
