Metric - Victim of Luck

Metric is a band from Canada that was formed in 1998. They’ve won four Juno Awards, including Group of the Year. Rolling Stone included them in their list of the 50 Greatest Canadian Artists of All Time. In April 2026, Metric released their 10th album, Romanticize the Dive. And for this episode, I spoke to Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw about how they made the opening song on that album, “Victim of Luck.” For more info, visit songexploder.net/metric. https://songexploder.net/metric

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carry. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. It's now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know that it was Song Exploder. You'll be supporting the show. This episode is sponsored by the podcast What It's Like to Be. Do you ever think about what other people's workdays look like? Satisfying some of that curiosity is the idea at the heart of bestselling author Dan Heath's podcast, which is called What It's Like to Be. In each episode, Dan interviews someone from a different profession to find out what it's like to be a professional Santa Claus, or a Secret Service agent, or a long-haul truck driver,

• 2:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  or an aerospace engineer at NASA, just to name a few examples. The show gives you an insider view into all kinds of jobs from a wide range of industries, answering questions like, "What do mail carriers learn about us from our mail?" There are so many jobs out there that exist only as titles in our imagination, if they even register that much. This show is a chance to reach beyond what you know, or think you know. If you're curious to learn more about the work lives of other people, check out What It's Like to Be, wherever you get podcasts. This episode has some explicit language.

• 3:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Metric is a band from Canada that was formed in 1998. They've won four Juno Awards, including Group of the Year, and Rolling Stone included them in their list of the 50 greatest Canadian artists of all time. In April 2026, Metric released their 10th album, Romanticize the Dive. And for this episode, I spoke to Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw about how they made the opening song on that album, Victim of Love.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  I'm Emily from Metric and I write songs and I sing and I play synths. I started this band with Jimmy in 98.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I'm Jimmy Shaw, the other co-founder and sort of the musical director, if you will. And there's Joshua Winstead, who plays bass guitar, and there's Jules Scott Key, who plays drums.

• 4:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So I'm curious, with such a long history of working together, was there a particular headspace or emotional place that you found yourselves in when you were going in to make this album?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we actually, it was quite a plan this time around. I remember I was talking to Jimmy on the phone and we were like, what's the vision? It's our 10th album. This is monumental for us. How should we approach it? And we had the idea of this like, what would Metric do ethos? Instead of referencing other artists while we were working, we would just reference ourselves and go back and be like, what would we do? What is this essence of who we are?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  We've just moved our studio to this place in the countryside, kind of in the woods, north of Toronto, and we call it Main Street. And it's amazing space. And we were there all the time. We were there every day for a long, long time.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  I came into the studio with this idea of this fictional, sort of like Ziggy Stardust character and this story of a band, like an almost famous kind of could have been band. And the life that you spend, the dedication that you spend, and the sacrifices that you make and the commitment to it. You stay with it regardless and that you'd rather that than any other life. And I came back to the piano and recorded it. It was the start of something scattered pieces,

• 5:43Speaker 01

  long before all the stories like who discover you a starving artist. What's your thesis? I'm a starving artist. Clav discover, gears start talking in the side. Show you a thing or two, graduate from bars. Shoot us like magnets to a venue on the sun. We'll all be buried wearing vomit and verdun.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  And I had been on a walk and heard that melody in my head. And I came back to the piano and recorded it and then brought it in with all these ideas of somehow talking about this fictional band.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  A lot of times when we start the recording process of these songs and Emily brings something in, she'll usually have it in GarageBand.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Or a voice note.

• 7:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  How do you go about translating something like that into what the arrangement's going to be for the full band?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Those two little melodies, you know, there was the main melody and then there's the counter melody that happens up top. It was the sort of interaction between those two things that we were trying to explore and trying to develop. And so it was two things that happened on the first day. There was like a modular synth, sort of like a pulsing thing that's going like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  And it's kind of holding like some like very static harmony down. And then the bass synth line.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Which was all sort of about those moving notes.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  You know, we were just kind of throwing everything at the wall in like a really relaxed and very enjoyable and fun way.

• 8:08Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And so was it just the two of you in the studio working on this?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  No, it's me and Emily and Liam. Liam O'Neill. Liam is kind of like the other X factor. He's the keyboard player in Kings of Leon and was in The Stills. And Emily and I discovered a long time ago that we can't really work with just the two of us. There has to be a third person in the room. Someone needs to man Pro Tools so we can be the musicians. Also, like, you know, Emily and I's relationship is like, we argue. And when there's someone else in the room, it makes sense. If we're just arguing with each other, then it's just an argument. And so Liam is kind of like a fifth member of the band. It's like an extended family.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  A lot of what we were doing in those recordings was smashing drum mics, overcompressing stuff and going for like the sort of Dave Friedman MGMT, big crunchy drum sound.

• 9:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So I have this early recording you sent me. What is this demo that we're listening to?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  So we would do bounces as the days went on. And the one that I sent you was the most indicative of when we started to get the right idea.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  But that was like many, many phases in.

• 9:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What comes to your mind when you hear this older version right now?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  That any other band, this would have been totally great.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  But it was still just vague.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  You know, it's partly because of the audio quality, but it's partly because it's like trouble, whether it's trouble or luck. It's like, what are you saying? It's like still hiding behind some gauzy words.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  But we knew there was something in this song for like a very, very long time.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  It was sort of like sculpture. It was in there, but it was in a block of marble. And we had quite a journey pulling it out.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  This song had many, many lives from that point forward.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got to this point in May of last year and I was in Barcelona and I was walking around listening to all the mixes and there was like three or four songs that were just reading like aggressive from like a sonic perspective. So I called John. John O'Malley is a mixer and an engineer and a producer that we've worked with off and on for long, almost longer than anyone. She has a good way of putting things sometimes. And he says, you know, if you want it to sound like there's reverb on everything, you don't put reverb on everything because then you can't hear the reverb anymore. You take reverb off of everything except the one thing that has the most transients and

• 11:37Speaker 02

  then you put reverb on that and then it feels like everything has reverb on it. And so smashing these drum mics was just eating up every little bit of headroom for everything else and you couldn't hear any reverbs or delays or anything because the drums were just eating everything up. So he was like, we gotta go back to the studio and we gotta re-record drums.

• 12:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  In this new drum recording, I noticed that there's a separate layer of just cymbals.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Well, if you want your kick and your snare to be like big, when you add splashy cymbals to that, you know, they're gonna go crazy in the room mics. So the clean way to do it is to separate them and to overdub them. A lot of the time you lose the feel, but this time it kind of worked.

• 12:37Hrishikesh Hirway?

  More with Metric after this.

• 12:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 13:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 14:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 14:58Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 15:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 15:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So what was the work that you had to do then in order to get the song from where it was to where it ultimately ended up?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Victim of Luck was the last thing that we finished lyrically because I had done this rewrite. And I was like, this is it. I finally, I know I have it. I know this is it. And then it was like, I don't know about this. I don't know about that. And I guess we had one last session. And I was like, let's play destroy the ego. Like, what isn't working? What are the words? What are the, like, which word? Like, what don't you understand of what I'm trying to say? How am I not saying it?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  I don't think we were seeing it necessarily clearly at the moment, but we knew somewhere in us that the song was song one on the album. And for us, the first song is supposed to really encapsulate the rest of what you're going to hear. And so you couldn't start with like an abstract moment. It needed to like start with something tangible.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I definitely prefer to write in code. Definitely there are times when it comes to me as like an external character.

• 16:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The fictional bed in the story.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then in real time, it was like me owning that I was talking about myself.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And that's when we also said the phrase victim of luck for the first time.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  I

• 17:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What did that phrase "victim of luck" mean for you?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Well, I love it, the idea that you can be a victim of good luck. I love the idea that here I am with this incredible life and all I'm seeing is all my flaws. And the only reason I'm in this tortured position is because I'm so lucky to have this life of playing music with my friends for 25 years and making my 10th album and living this long and doing all of it. And all it's meaning to me is like more self-scrutiny and less courage and more lameness.

• 17:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Why less courage?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Because that's what happens to people. You get more established.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  More to lose.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. And even until that moment, we started the whole song with "Take It From The Top Again",

• 18:05Speaker 01

  which was just like, what? But this is the top. Like, it was close, but it was like, no, that should have been the second verse, not the first. And I think "Let Me Take You Back" was the line that happened last, that then made the whole thing click. It made the whole thesis of the album.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  We've been talking about how we had this piano intro that wasn't working for us for a long time.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  But we were very sentimental about that piano part staying in because that was the source of it all.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  We wanted to still sort of like... Have this idea that you could hear the sort of embryonic moment. And then it's kind of just like exploded into the whole band. And then finally like landed on like, maybe it's the piano thing that's driving us crazy.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  We tried so many different variations sonically of that top line. It was gonna kill us, but we felt like we had to hold on to it. And then at some point, we were just like, maybe we don't need that.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  There was a whole other song that the only thing that was working was the intro. The rest of the song basically got scrapped. And when we were like, let's get rid of the piano intro. Someone in the room was like, why don't we go get the intro from the song that we don't like? What that actually is, is Jules hitting sticks and stuff and weird cymbal swell-y stuff. And me running it through multiple tape echoes.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  And then the whole thing got moved over.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  And the synth orchestra like just tuning up. They're just sort of coming together from like, you know, across the universe.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  The bucle is such a cool instrument.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  It doesn't respond to things in normal ways and it's not supposed to. And you just kind of like hold down notes on this like touchpad. Everything reacts against each other within the instrument. So it's like anytime you turn something up, it's affecting something else. So it's everything modulates everything within it. It's not the greatest thing of playing like a in tune melody. But it's the greatest thing for doing the things that you just heard.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  About halfway through like the sonic chaos where I was doing some crazy stuff with it. And, and all of a sudden I got it to lock and do something cool.

• 21:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Emily, I'm curious, given how exacting your lyric writing process is, how do you feel about chaotic music elements like this?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, I love them. I mean, it's like he can express an emotion with that instrument. Like, we need this feeling. And one of the tools to create this feeling is are these abstract sounds that like just make everything better. They adds this like dissonance and depth. It sounds like the feeling of when you're like whee, like with your, like on the top of a roller coaster, right? It's like

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  And just hearing that soloed, it's so much the heart of the song. Like, that feeling of like, like, shoot me like a magnet, like, I'm going, I don't know, I'm like, I'm doing this. There's a fearlessness within that sound, and I don't know of another instrument that could have conveyed all that.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  It's wild how instruments can do that.

• 22:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Going back to what you had said in the beginning about the idea of like having a lot to lose, you know, having the stakes be high for you all because of the success that you've had. You know, in the song, you have this line, "I'm trying to live my life like it's never been done." And of course, in the chorus, you know, like, "At last, I don't give a fuck." And I was wondering, like, is that how you feel now? Or is that aspirational still of like, I'm gonna get there?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so funny you should say that because that's exactly what I feel now is I'm like, it's doing the manifestation thing, which is like, well, now I really do have to get there. If I'm saying that this is where I'm at, I've gotta get out of the vanity. I gotta do what I allegedly say I have accomplished in terms of my perspective, and I have to like not give a fuck about the things that don't need to be given a fuck about, you know? So it's kind of a hybrid that I have now, like a spiritual obligation to honor what I said is true. So wish me luck with that.

• 23:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now, here's Victim of Luck by Metric, in its entirety.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Let me take you back, it was the start of something. I was there, not long before the start. Now I'm in front of you and all I'm seeing is all my flaws. I was a starving artist, but I was fearless. Now I don't know what we are, frightened of heights, we knew scared to go too far. How am I going to you now, who have I become? Trash that mirror, let my black mascara run.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  Say you're never better, baby, am I a victim of life?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Never better, baby, at last I don't give a fuck. Baby, I'm free.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Countdown to a heart mess, five, four, three, two, one. It's time to live my life like it's never been done. Shoot me like a magnet, oh, to the sun. Your battle ain't been ever. Taking from the top again, sword is double-edged. Frightened of heights, we knew don't know what's ahead. Shoot like a magnet to the surface of the sun. Trash that mirror, let my black mascara run.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Say you're never better, baby, am I a victim of life?

• 27:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  To learn more, visit songexploder.net. You'll find links to buy or stream Victim of Luck, and you can watch the music video. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, Kathleen Smith, and Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.