METRIC: THE TOPAZ TOUR

Following the success of their last album "Fantasies," which was self-released outside Canada and sold well over a million albums/singles worldwide, "Synthetica" will continue the trend and be released through the band's own label (with joint venture partner Mom + Pop in the USA).

While many artists feel strangled by the industry's power structure, the Toronto-based quartet has undone all their business entanglements and started their own company, Metric Music International (MMI) with the help of independent managers Mathieu Drouin and Françoise de Grandpre.

On "Fantasies," they became the first artist in history to achieve their first ever Top 20 hit at U.S. commercial radio without the backing of a traditional label; sold out arenas and headlined festivals; picked up JUNO Awards for "Alternative Album of the Year" and "Band of the Year"; had a hand in scoring films for everyone from Edgar Wright to David Cronenberg, and wrote the theme song for the Grammy nominated and Academy Award shortlisted "Twilight: Eclipse" soundtrack with composer Howard Shore. They even performed "Gimme Sympathy" at a private event for the Queen of England.

Work on "Synthetica" began literally the day after the "Fantasies" tour ended in Miami at the Art Basel modern art festival in November 2010. METRIC's Emily Haines, Jimmy Shaw, Joules Scott Key and Joshua Winstead returned to Giant Studios in Toronto and work on the album concluded a year later at New York's Electric Lady Studios. "Synthetica" was produced by Jimmy Shaw and mixed by John O'Mahony.

Shaw describes "Synthetica"'s enthralling balance of futuristic and organic sound on the new record as "[...] the culmination of everything we've done. We've always had a sound in our heads that we hoped to realize. We finally heard it coming back out of the speakers this time." Haines first envisioned the word "Synthetica" as the name for a particularly resilient skin-job from Blade Runner, a female replicant who voices an inner monologue of all your human imperfections. "If you imagine a nightmarishly fake version of me as a pop star, that's her," she says. "And this record was about me saying, I'm going to give more to the music than ever, but there's no way I'm going to turn into someone like that." As she sings on the album's hard-rocking title track; "We're all the time confined to fit the mold / But I won't ever let them make a loser of my soul."