Synthetica

If 2009's Fantasies was about escaping the familiar and exploring the world, Synthetica is about finding the courage to stay home and deal with your own reflection in the mirror. "It‘s about facing what you know is true," Haines says. The band — Haines, Shaw, bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott Key — started work on the album literally the day after their final Fantasies show at the Art Basel modern art festival in Miami at the end of November 2010. They were emboldened by their fourth album's success (nearly 500,000 albums and over 1 million singles sold worldwide) and thinking big. But the real breakthrough came when pieces of vintage gear began fortuitously falling into their laps.

Guitarist-producer Jimmy Shaw puts it this way, "Synthetica is the sonic culmination of everything we have done. We‘ve always had a sound in our heads that we hoped to realize. We finally heard it coming out of the speakers this time. It's futuristic and synthesized, yet also organic." The album was mixed by long time METRIC collaborator and Grammy-nominated indie-rock specialist John O‘Mahony at New York‘s famed Electric Lady Studios.