Metz - The new standard-bearers of post-hardcore

We're at the start of the 2010s, the setting is sprawling Canada, specifically (at least during their formative years) Ottawa, where singer/guitarist Alex Edkins and drummer Hayden Menzies meet through mutual friends. The two share the same musical tastes, go to the same punk-rock shows practically every night, and decide to start playing together just to pass the time. They draw on hardcore- and grunge-derived sounds, echoing the blueprint of Bad Brains, Husker Du, Mission Of Burma, Jesus Lizard, Fugazi, Shellac and part of the Seattle scene.

The focus then shifts to the Greater Toronto Area, where Alex and Hayden decide to relocate after about a year of rehearsing as the fledgling Metz project. There they meet bassist Chris Slorach, and the lineup is complete. Little by little the songs take shape, and the first live shows follow in their home area. But while Ottawa already had a thriving post-hardcore scene, few bands in Toronto played that kind of music, so it was easy for the trio to carve out some visibility for themselves. The band are close friends with fellow Canadians Constantines, who by then already had a couple of albums out on Sub Pop, and through them they manage to get some of their own recordings to the storied label. Incredible but true: the connection works, and before long Metz find themselves recording their debut album directly for one of the most prestigious and significant labels on the planet.

On October 9, 2012, their debut album Metz comes out, an incendiary blend of post-hardcore, grunge and punk grafted onto an unstoppable bed of noise/shoegaze that immediately draws the attention of the leading specialist magazines. The closeness to the Nirvana sound is striking (just listen to "Sad Pricks"...), but there's much more going on here too, like the Sonic Youth echoes that surface in the instrumental twists of "The Mule". "Wet Blanket" is the lead single, boosted by a video that within a few days racks up huge numbers online. Every track is worth noting, there's not a single misstep, but rather a handful of songs that lodge themselves in your head despite offering no obvious melodic hook, starting with the devastating "Knife In The Water" (often used to open their shows), which pairs with its twin "Headache", strategically placed as the opener.

What strikes you most is the sheer power of the sound, which fits perfectly with the imagery conjured by the Sub Pop logo, and while on record it's especially the guitars and the effects-laden drums that amaze (along with the three musicians' lively stage presence), live it's the bass that will surprise, cutting through everything. "Metz" stands as an uncompromising debut, violent, at times even savage, arguably a kind of millennial Bleach, thanks to genuine sonic assaults titled "Get Off", "Rats", "Wasted", "Negative Space". Nothing here is calculated, theirs is a natural pull toward that kind of sound, but it's clear how forcefully the bands they listened to and loved seep into their songwriting.

With an album like this, Metz are immediately thrust into the international spotlight, sparking a long promotional tour that takes them everywhere, Italy included, where they play on February 20, 2013 at the Magnolia in Milan, on the 21st at Traffic in Rome and on the 22nd at Freak Out in Bologna, delivering dissonant, devastating live shows. They often get the chance to share the stage with some sacred monsters of the underground circuit, many of whom are the trio's own inspirations, like Mudhoney or Meat Puppets, but there are also significant crossovers with much more recent acts, such as Japandroids or Fucked Up.

In their spare time, the band writes new material collectively: they get together in the rehearsal room, crank the amps to full volume, and then work around a selection of riffs, rhythms and melodies. All the while well aware of just how much anticipation is building for the second chapter of their discography.

That anticipation is rewarded in May 2015 with the release of II, again on Sub Pop. The cover once again depicts figures with bowed heads: where three years earlier a schoolboy (bored or despairing?) was shown hunched over his books, now we see two silhouettes sitting on a bench by the sea, portraying all the anguish of the world, all the unease of a generation that has lost every point of reference. In 2015 you certainly can't approach an album like this with nostalgic excuses: you have to appreciate the confident, anything-but-green attitude of three guys from Toronto who are able not just to replicate but to fully update an aesthetic, translating well-known sounds into the present. The recipe is the same as on the debut, a sonic blend capable of fusing punk (there's a lot of John Lydon's Pil in these grooves), post-hardcore and Nirvana ("Eyes Peeled", just to give one example, turns out to be a thoroughly successful synthesis of it all). From the opening "Acetate" onward, devastating fury and raging teen spirit coexist, but within the folds of these ten tracks there's not a single moment of rest.

At times the results are slightly catchier than in the past (the little choruses of "The Swimmer"), but never too accessible: the hardcore substrate remains dominant throughout, with no room for compromise. The songs kick off like sonic ambushes, as if each time they were about to play out the last three minutes of their lives (one above all: "Spit You Out", which then closes masterfully with guitars launched down unmistakably noise-driven paths). The whole exercise wraps up in a clean thirty minutes, abrasive and hyper-electric, an avalanche of debris crashing down on you, with only the brief interlude of "Zzyzx" as a breather, a dividing line before the second half of the album, which shows no mercy and fires off in rapid succession the three gut-punches "I.O.U.", "Landfill" and "Nervous System". "Wait In Line", the aforementioned "Eyes Peeled" and "Kicking A Can Of Worms" close things out masterfully, perhaps repeating the same formula to the letter (the only possible foothold for the inevitable detractors), but never pulling back, aiming straight at the target and blowing it to pieces.

Further welcome confirmation arrives in September 2017 with the trio's third record, Strange Peace, again on Sub Pop, but this time produced by Steve Albini, an ideal, multi-layered closing of the circle, with the first two tracks on the album, the devastating "Mess Of Wires" and "Drained Lake", alone enough to confirm the great success of a pairing that could hardly have produced anything less than memorable. Two uncompromising statements of intent, the new sonic apocalypses laid out in a terrifying sequence that confirm the talent of a band well above average, delivering eleven close-combat assaults that find in Alex Edkins' voice the perfect vehicle for expressing all the suffering of the world, even more vividly than before. The dramatic unfolding of "Lost In The Blank City" is their new manifesto on urban disorientation, but the whole album distills that perfect synthesis of Nirvana and Fugazi that Cobain himself would probably have approved of. And it does so not only in the tracks pushed to the max ("Mr. Plague", "Common Trash"), but also in those that sketch out a slightly more accessible chorus (though still buried under a haze of sonic dust, "Cellophane"), or when they lean into noise minimalism built on the apathetic repetition of a few notes ("Caterpillar", "Sink").

"Strange Peace" is a tectonic record that sounds like a panic attack, music made on impulse, without overthinking it, without calculation, relying on high volume and distortion pedals with the LEDs stuck on red, an explosive blend that gives shape to inner turmoil and incurable anxieties. The tension is palpable, the danger looming, the neurosis constant, in a process of self-pulverization that keeps the listener frozen on the edge of the precipice, perpetually assailed by a sense of threat that never lets go, but then, listening closely, everything turns out to be strikingly harmonious (and this is the band's greatest achievement), a kind of ordered chaos, the very same that surfaced within the folds of "Bleach" and "In Utero". Toward the end, the irresistible one-two of "Escalator Teeth"/"Dig A Hole" is a concentrate of power and energy, two blistering minutes that pave the way for the closer "Raw Materials", a train hurtling toward a wall, with Jesus Lizard and Sonic Youth on board, playing the last song before the end of the world.

On July 12, 2019, "Automat" arrives, which can effectively be considered a sort of Metz equivalent of "Incesticide". "Automat" is in fact not a true "new" album from the Canadian trio, but rather a collection of material dating back to the band's very earliest days (all the singles that predate the debut album and their respective b-sides), plus other later rarities. It starts right from their first release, January 2009, marked by the post-hardcore rage oozing from the metallic stomp of "Soft Whiteout" and the guitars that grate the air in the industrial approach of "Lump Sums", made even darker by those indecipherable screams that seem to rise from underground straight into your guts. Back then the first album was still a long way off, but all the seeds had already been sown. The sonic terrorism of "Ripped On The Fence", which would follow in June, and the noise-wave of "Automat" (August 2010), which veers toward A Place To Bury Strangers territory, are pieces of a puzzle that, bit by bit, reveal their clear coordinates, confirmed by the more recent "Can't Understand" (2013) and "Eraser" (2016, from the period between "II" and "Strange Peace"). In between are a couple of previously released tracks, but the 7" version of "Negative Space" and the demo of "Wet Blanket" are alternate takes of the tracks found on the self-titled 2012 debut.

An impressively powerful, uncompromising sound, a one-way noise trip straight to hell, played out over twelve tracks even more extreme than anything heard on the three albums released so far. But the greatest virtue of "Automat" lies in how cohesive the whole thing feels, despite being a compilation of material never conceived to live under the same roof. A sign that, over time, the Toronto band has managed to preserve and hold onto its defining traits. The overall feeling is "astonishing": Metz's leftovers alone would have been enough to make the fortune of any other post-hardcore band in the world. That's to underline the importance of a record that completes the entire body of work filed under "Metz", but one that is by no means aimed exclusively at die-hard completists of Alex Edkins and co. The vinyl edition of "Automat" also includes three bonus tracks: covers of Sparklehorse ("Pig"), Urinals ("I'm A Bug") and Gary Numan ("M.E.").

Starting August 20, the three covers will also be available separately, on the EP M. E.: a tribute, but at the same time the challenge of stamping their own aesthetic onto songs that aren't theirs. "Pig" by Mark Linkous's Sparklehorse (the original appeared on 1998's "Good Morning Spider") and "I'm A Bug" by Californian punk rockers Urinals are made even more uncompromising, swallowed whole by the Canadian trio's distinctive sonic approach. The first had been released on a limited-edition split put out for Record Store Day 2012 by Sonic Boom, a Toronto record store, while the second was only ever shared on YouTube back in 2014.

But it's with the closing track, the only previously unreleased one, which also gives the whole EP its title, "M. E." by Gary Numan (from "The Pleasure Principle", 1979), that Alex Edkins and co. push further, into less travelled territory, where the wave influence comes through strongly, even if wrapped in a layer of electricity. A well-executed exercise that adds nothing to what Metz had already produced, who are far more compelling when working on their own material. Now that the drawers have been completely emptied out and made public, we wait to see what they do next...

The next moves came together right in the middle of the pandemic: Atlas Vending, Metz's fourth album, once again iconically released on Sub Pop, came out in early October 2020. Atlas Vending doesn't shift the Canadian band's coherent stylistic core all that much, but in its own way it adds a few flashes of novelty, particularly noticeable in the noise-psych-shoegaze instrumental coda of the closing "A Boat To Drown In", built on the sheer disruptive force of a simple riff made of just two chords. To balance out such an unusually long track, Atlas Vending also offers songs that find their strength in brevity, like the extremely short "No Ceiling", which burns through in a little over a minute, and the propulsive industrial-punk drive that defines the violent "Parasite".

Besides these, the best moments can be found in the breakneck-paced ferocity of "Blind Your Industrial Park" and "The Mirror", and in the definitive revelation of their boundless love for Fugazi, which burns true in "Hail Taxi". The brutal power of the Metz sound is once again channeled into a set of songs that go straight for the gut, leaving the rage and roar of their previous records fully intact. Anxiety, frustration, the urge to vomit out malaise and disillusionment, hollowed-out loves, wasted youth, but above all a rhythm section with nuclear-grade power and wonderfully dissonant guitars ("Sugar Pill"), which sometimes ring out menacingly ("Pulse"), like air-raid shelter sirens.

Unable to tour behind the new record, in October 2020 Metz put on a show (closed to the public, of course) at Toronto's Opera House, to be broadcast via streaming. The recording of that performance materialized in August 2021 as their first live album, Live At The Opera House. The band plays the album in full, following the same sequence as the studio version, plus two encores, "Negative Space" and "Wet Blanket", both taken from their self-titled 2012 debut.

Produced by Graham Walsh of Holy Fuck, Live At The Opera House comes with a live film directed by Scott Cudmore, and serves as a prelude to a long tour announced for the early months of 2022, with a substantial number of dates scheduled across North America and Europe.

In spring 2022 Alex Edkins made his recording debut with his own solo project, Weird Nightmare, releasing the self-titled album, also via Sub Pop. Put together during the pandemic months, "Weird Nightmare" brings together a few songs that had been left in a drawer at the Edkins household, not in line with the Toronto trio's mood because of their more conventional structures, alongside experiments carried out in domestic solitude between one lockdown and the next, here bolstered by the contribution of drummer Loel Campbell, previously of Wintersleep and Holy Fuck. As an antidote to depression, during this period Edkins chose to replace darkness with light, steering away from seeking out violent, disturbing solutions at all costs, and instead crafting a raw alt-pop in which melodic elements are almost always dominant.

Weird Nightmare doesn't have the power of Metz's records, nor does it aim to, though a couple of tracks ("Nits", "Oh No" featuring Chad VanGaalen) do end up brushing up against similar shores. "Wrecked", sung as a duet with Alicia Bognanno of label mates Bully, carries the indie spirit that was big on American college radio back in the Nineties, "Lusitania" and "Sunday Driver" could easily be mistaken for a couple of Pixies outtakes, and "Searching For You" is a breakneck power-punk track. And as a closing touch, toward the end we find an acoustic-folk sketch ("Zebra Dance") and the enveloping closer "Holding Out".

A year later Alex Edkins launched another project without the backing of his longtime bandmates, called Noble Rot, this time shared with Graham Walsh of Holy Fuck.

At the same time, bassist Chris Slorach also broke away temporarily to join the ever-shifting lineup of The Armed, taking part (as singer and guitarist) in the recording of the well-received "Ultrapop" and "Perfect Saviors".

The trio reunited in 2024 for Up On Gravity Hill, released on April 12, which confirms the stylistic expansion embarked on in the two previous records. The Toronto outfit delivers a new batch of songs that hit hard from the very first note. Eight assault tracks, once again stamped Sub Pop, rock-solid and landing right in your face, as with "Glass Eye" and "Entwined", yet also able, when needed, to build a certain radio-friendly roundness of their own, as happens on "Never Still Again".

Adding further richness to the final result are the (ultimately understated) appearances of Owen Pallett and Amber Webber, the former female voice of Black Mountain, a guest on "Light Your Way Home", a closing track that veers toward nu-gaze horizons, brushing up against the territory of Nothing, another band that in the new millennium has helped revive and relaunch Nineties-rooted sounds. In his spare time Edkins also writes film scores, but these are minor detours from the main road: the real game he always plays is with Metz, with these obsessive guitars backed by a devastating rhythm section. He is the charismatic leader and expressive voice of one of the highest-rated bands of the last twenty years.

On October 10, 2024, out of the blue, via a joint statement posted on social media, the trio announced their decision to bring their shared artistic journey to an end. Metz will stay together for one last European tour, already scheduled for the whole of the following November. The first date is set for November 2 in Rennes, France, the last for November 29 in London.

Throughout their career Metz have always shown an enviable consistency, never giving in to flattery, steering clear of any trend, not caring about hype or compromise. Constantly indifferent to sales figures, yet always operating at a level of absolute excellence: it's impossible not to count them among the best hardcore-grunge-punk bands of all time, with nothing to envy in the classics of the Dischord/Touch & Go circuit. The Canadian trio has succeeded in updating, for the new millennium, the state of the art of a genre that - thanks (in part) to their contribution - has once again become molten-hot and extremely relevant.

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