Metric - Victim of Luck

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 Hrishikesh Hirway. This episode has some explicit language. [upbeat music] 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 tenth 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.

So you're never better, baby. I'm not a victim of luck. Never better, baby. I was a victim of luck. Never better, baby. At last I don't give a fuck. Baby, not me. I'm Emily from Metric, and I write songs, and I sing, and I play synths. I started this band with Jimmy in '98.

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 Joules Scott-Key, who plays drums.

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?

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 tenth 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?"

We'd 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 an amazing space. And we were there all the time. We were there every day for a long, long time.

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 coulda 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 long before all the stories. Like who'd discover you? A starving artist. What's your thesis? I'm a starving artist. Craft discoverer. Start talking on the side. Show you a thing or two. Graduate from bars. Shoot us like magnets to a venue in the sun. We'll all be buried where I'm Balmain and Verdun. Or not, though I know someone's got to summit to the top, and it could be me, but it won't be. I know someone's got to summit to the top, and it won't be me. 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.

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.

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