You released the awesome album Art of Doubt last year, and you just came back from a massive tour!

Yeah, we just got back from Europe. We were there from mid-October until the end of November. We performed in some places we’ve never been to, which is a strange thing after being a band for fifteen years! We played in twenty cities, and about half of those places were cities we’ve never played before. We did Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, Prague and Zurich, Barcelona and Madrid – we’d never played in Spain before – and Copenhagen, it was very interesting. To see people that I think maybe hadn’t really registered with us – we had reached those people before, but once we got to those places and were playing these shows, we instantly realized that these people had been waiting to see our show for five years, or for some of them fifteen years, which was cool.

The moment on the first show in Moscow – Emily and I went to a radio station, and while we were on a commercial break and we were trying to figure out what our set list was going to be that night, I asked the radio DJ if there was a song that was big with the Russian audience. He said: yeah, your big single! I asked, what’s the big single? He replied Gimme Sympathy, from 2010, which was apparently a huge hit in Russia! We didn’t know that (laughs).

Halfway through the set, Emily said: we haven’t played this song in a tarnation, probably for seven or eight years, but we were told it was a big thing here in Russia. We played the song, and the audience just went completely berserk!

It’s fascinating how much of your career you have no idea what’s happening.

Must’ve been awesome facing a huge, happy audience in Moscow!

Moscow was just such a trip. I kept feeling like all the movies I’d seen got it all right: the men in black with the earpieces, the women in furs, the fur hats and the jewelry, the opulence. It all just looks so perfect, I couldn’t believe it! The show was awesome. Over a thousand people, sold out, it was fantastic.

I’ve never been to Moscow even though it’s not that far from Sweden, but I like to imagine it’s all just as you say and all set in glorious architecture like in that movie, Russian Ark.

Exactly. I kept feeling like, whoever the casting director is around here is, he’s absolutely killing it (laughs)!

What’s your live setup like?

Emily does almost all the singing, and she also has two keyboards on stage. Josh and I have two keyboards as well, but primarily just play bass and guitar. The keyboards are filling in some moments here and there and we use a sampler for some backing tracks.

For me, primarily, the Elektron stuff came to me when we were starting to make the last record Art of Doubt. We had hired this producer named Justin Meldal-Johnsen, and he’s fantastic. I wanted to work with him for years, and we reached out to him and sent him some music. He wrote back right away: I love this! I know you guys! Let’s meet up and talk about working together! We were in LA a couple of days later, and we met up and just instantly got along. When we first started talking, me and him would have these long conversations about process and gear and we would nerd out on synths and drum machines. We were talking about what we would use in the first part of the process, for sketching out ideas. He said that he’d been using the Elektron Rytm a lot. He was a big fan of it. I wanted to try it, so he sent me his and it arrived a week later.

Drum machines have always been a bit difficult for me. I always felt like I was never really the type of musician that would go full electronic and go deep into it, where you could really get into the technology of it. I wanted something that I could sketch with fast. He said this would be good, but I had my doubts because when I had tried using an 808 or a 909 it’s just so referential, you know? You’re doing an 808 beat or a 909 beat.

I felt, with the Rytm, it was really the first time I could really get my own idea across. I just love the tones of it. The tones are different from any other machine I’ve used, especially with the overdrive. Overdrive is difficult with a box like that, because a lot of the time it just ends up making things sound smaller, but with the Rytm it didn’t. It enhanced the sound without subtracting from it.

You named your band after a sound you made, right?

Yeah (laughs) it was on an Akai S900, a long time ago. I don’t even own that sampler anymore. It was way back, we used it for a track that Emily and I made before we called anything Metric. The first thing we did together was a four-song thing that we called the Mainstream EP. We had a drum loop that was called Metric, and it was from that EP but to be honest with you I don’t remember what song. I just remember, in the studio around that point, we knew we were going to have to name the band at some point and read the name Metric! I think that’s the case with a lot of bands: it was like, great we got the name, let’s move on and never waste a second thinking about it!

Do you think you can recreate that loop on a Rytm?

You know what, I think if I knew what the loop was I could, but I genuinely can’t remember what it may have been!

You did the soundtracks for Cosmopolis and Twilight in collaboration with Howard Shore. How did that happen?

When he was doing Twilight, the film company had the idea of him collaborating with a popular artist. He was like, ok, I’m into that idea but I don’t know who that would be. They just sort of sent him literally just a link to about 50 different artists. He said he’d never heard of us before, but he just connected with what we were doing. He thought we’d be the perfect fit, so he just called us out of the blue! We ended up working with him on that. He was the scorer of that film, and we collaborated on the title track, the theme song. It was a great collaboration, and he was a wonderful guy to work with and it’s fascinating to have met him and have a glimpse into that process.

A couple of years later, he just called us out of the blue and said I’m doing this Cronenberg film, and I have a couple of ideas that I kind of would prefer if I just kind of send you some really rough ideas, and then you guys just totally go crazy and basically do the whole thing, then bring it back to me and then I will sort of oversee and edit and make sure what you’ve done will fit into the movie.

It was kind of around the time that movie Drive was out. You know that movie? That soundtrack was just everywhere, and you couldn’t walk a hundred meters, anywhere in the world without hearing that soundtrack. It was so popular! Me and a guy named Liam O’Neil, who was working on Metric stuff with us for several years, he’s now the keyboard player in Kings of Leon, him and I started working on that score together, and we basically scored the entire thing in the style of that Drive soundtrack.

Very synth heavy, pumping eight-notes and Linndrum-type beats. Quite poppy as well, but in a sort of dark way. Then Howard came to Toronto and he sat in the studio with us and we played him the whole thing. He said, guys, this is perfect! You hit it out of the park! Everything you did is bang on. Now, I want you to go back and do the whole thing again, with completely different instrumentation!

I was like, why would we do that? It makes no sense to do it again! We did everything right! He just said because this is the way I work. Don’t question how I work! So, we went back, we did the whole thing again, and then he basically took both scores and mixed them together. Very strange process. I wouldn’t have done it the same way. I preferred our first score.

Sounds like twice the amount of work.

Yeah, and possibly half the result (laughs)!

I’m not sure he’s hands-on familiar with synths and stuff, but when you’ve made all those sounds and tweaked everything – being asked to do everything again is like tuning every single instrument in a symphony orchestra all over again, right?

Absolutely. The second time we basically went back and did the whole thing with guitars. We basically played a lot of the same music, but we completely changed the instrumentation. We went as organic as possible, as opposed to as electronic as possible. The result ended up as being sort of this mix of sound. To me, it kind of lost a little bit of its identity because of that. But what do I know, you know? I’m not Howard Shore. I haven’t won 15 Grammys or done any Scorsese film, so...

In any case, I hope there will be more joint efforts between the two of you in the future!

Me too.

You met David Cronenberg too, I guess?

No, I never met him.

He’s so private and secretive!

Yeah. He’s also from Toronto. I figured, right at the beginning, oh we’ll be working with Cronenberg, but there was never even any correspondence. That was another thing; Howard has practically scored every Cronenberg movie, the two of them are so tight that I think Howard was just kind of like head-out working on his side and then he (Cronenberg) just kind of bought the whole thing. It was almost like he was sectioning out to us, you know?

You’re a fan of Cronenberg’s work?

Oh yeah, sure. There are some classics in there.

You have a few Elektrons, right?

I have the Rytm MKII and the Heat MKII. Funnily enough, in the last ten days the guy I was just talking about, Liam, who’s in Kings of Leon, we were just obsessing about how much we’re listening to this record by Jon Hopkins called the Singularity. An amazing electronic record, almost like a more dancey, ravey version of Boards of Canada! Something like that, but more ambient as well. It’s such an awesome record, and I only discovered him very recently. So, we were just having a phone call and we were talking about that record. I said: when I get back from Europe, why don’t you come up to me in Toronto and then we can hang out for ten days me and you, just go into my studio and just jam for a week and a half or two weeks, do that kind of music and just see what happens?

We used to do that all the time when he lived in Toronto, go into the studio pretty much every day and just make stuff for the sake of making stuff, it didn’t have to be a project or anything specific. It was more just to stay musically lubricated, you know? He did, and for the last two weeks we’ve set up stations all over the studio where we basically just made these hour-long electronic ambient jams for two weeks. We’ll probably have to sit down and edit them into something cohesive, but this was really my first opportunity to really get into those two boxes. I had them both set up on top of my Jupiter-8, the Jupiter-8 was going through the Heat pretty much the whole time, and I had the Analog Rytm MKII beside it. I was just sort of riffing on those things, I was improvising to see what I could come up with.

I really love those two boxes, and the Heat to me is something I feel has been missing out of the studio, because I mean I have boxes like the Culture Vulture, and some studio rack pieces that do high-end distortion and overdrive and harmonic stuff, but it’s very different when it’s sitting in a rack and it’s XLR in and out, and you have to patch into a patch bay, it becomes more like outboard gear, like an effect, you know?

Synths sound good with a pedal. They sound good with effects. You can’t put an Eventide block on the end of every synthesizer. There’s this sort of gap where the Heat really came in, and you know I’ve been using drive pedals on synths forever, but they’re all mono, and they’re made for guitar line in and they’re not really made for synths. I just love what Heat does on keyboards! It’s so unique and cool. I barely record anything anymore without some version of drive or crunch or dirt on it, so that box is going to get used endlessly.

There is also an Elektron piece that I use live, and it has become a huge part of my rig: Analog Drive. I use that on my pedalboard on guitar. The guitar setup of the last album cycles I’ve been doing a wet/dry/wet guitar rig, so there’s three amps. It’s a very simple pedalboard. There’s four drive pedals, and then there’s two H9s. And the four drive pedals go to all three amps and the two H9’s go to the stereo amps on the side, not the amp up the middle. That Analog Drive is something that I feel like without knowing it that I’ve been waiting for the last ten years, because there was always this thing with this song or that song where you get really deep into having a long catalog, you know, seven records now, subtle changes all the time and you don’t necessarily want your lead sound to be the same exact sound for every song, you know? We want our catalog to feel varied. Especially little subtle things like, this lead sound can be the same as that one, but this one needs to be a little louder, this one needs to be a little quieter. Using the midi switch (on the Analog Drive), to be able to save presets of a drive pedal has completely changed the game for me. I can’t believe it didn’t really exist before you guys made it.

Now I have a request: if you could do the same thing for analog modulation, chorusing, phasing, flanging, stuff like that, that would be amazing! I mean, I love the Eventide stuff, but digital emulation of classic analog modulation doesn’t work that well.

I’ll ask the people at R&D and see what they think! One thing I found with the Analog Heat is that it’s neat to run vocals through it as well. You can isolate the frequency range to be affected by whatever you apply to it, so you can pinpoint with the filter cut-off the exact tone which the filter will sing and when you run vocals through it and you hit a certain note then the box will sing in harmony to that!

That makes a lot of sense. I’ve only had it for two weeks, and everything I’ve been doing with it was instrumental music so I haven’t had a chance to do that yet.