The Wedding Present + more across Manchester Academy.
On Gravity Hill will be released by METZ on April 12th.
The trio have announced a new album and international tour headed by two singles.
The new album is announced following two new singles and an international tour. Listen and pre-order here.
Their first album in four years, released on Sub Pop for the world ex-Canada and in Canada on Dine Alone, it was engineered by Seth Manchester (Mdou Moctar, Lingua Ignota, Battles, The Body) and features guest performances from Amber Webber of Black Mountain and composer/string arranger Owen Pallett.
The album finds the band (Alex Edkins on guitar & vocals, Hayden Menzies on drums, and Chris Slorach on bass), continuing to bend the raw power of rock music to its most delicate, intricate ends. Delivering a deep, detailed, and unyieldingly personal collection of songs that are fused together to form not only their most powerful record to date but also their most beautiful.
Check out the video to Entwined (Street Light Buzz) and 99.
METZ are band known for blowing out eardrums with songs of joyous rage, have, over their past few records, begun exploring ways to turn abrasiveness into atmospherics, the evolution of their sound not only a reflection of the maturing of the band themselves but also of a changed world that demands nuance and compassion to comprehend and to survive.
To spotlight this evolution, this necessity for swimming in a world that wouldn’t throw you a rubber dingy if it caught you drowning where the waters got a little too deep, this need for artistic survival as sharpening of their dynamic tools on whatever obstacles attempt an unwarranted intervention, the band has shared two new contrasting singles to sonically represent this fantastic split: the stomping motorik workout ’99’, and the deeply melodic, charging-churns that warms up whatever sleeps in the intestinal tracks of every human being anchored into place by both a sense of alienation and adventure ‘Entwined (Street Light Buzz)’.
And although that latter rough-cut gemstone offers a dreamier Swervedriver-esque guitar sheen never before utilised by the Canadian trio: a momentous, mammoth bombshell that feels like a cascade of butterflies eating your skin; there’s still plenty of dash that turns the knuckles cracked-white whilst the eyes fade in and out of focus and flicker red. This is unprecedented METZ.
Frontman Alex Edkins says, ‘These two songs couldn’t be more stylistically and thematically dissimilar. Entwined (Street Light Buzz) is a song about the deep connection humans can foster with one another and how we carry people with us forever, even after death. 99 is about the scourge of corporate greed and bottom-line thinking that runs rampant in modern society. Anything for a buck is the message being sent to younger generations’.
The band are also announcing a marathon of headlining, international tour supporting Up On Gravity Hill, with dates in North America from April 17th to May 17th and a run of UK and EU dates in the fall from November 3rd through November 29th with select dates supported by either Gouge Away or Rid of Me.
The band also has a series of UK and EU festival performances in August, including stops at Green Man Festival in the UK, La Route Du Rock and Cabaret Vert Festival in France, and the Canela Party in Spain. Tickets are available here.
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Photo by Vanessa Heins ©
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