METZ Streaming Full Length Debut + Interview in New Yorker

[newyorker.com] The Toronto trio METZ is rude, severe, and excellent. They make rock music, all of it loud, most of it precise without feeling checked. It’s raucous stuff, heavily indebted to music recorded for the Chicago label Tough & Go in the eighties, and recordings made in the nineties for the D.C. label Dischord. We are happy to be streaming their self-titled debut album, exclusively, for one week HERE. A few days ago, I spoke on the phone with the band’s guitarist and singer, Alex Edkins.

Can you give me a brief history of the band?

[The drummer] Hayden [Menzies] and I started playing music together in Ottawa when we were pretty young. We started METZ there with one other guy, about five years ago. We decided a change of scenery would be a good idea, so we moved down to Toronto four years ago. The other guy decided to stay in Ottawa.

The moment you started playing together was five years ago?

Yeah. But that’s before we met [the bassist] Chris [Slorach]. We found Chris in Toronto, and that’s when the real band came together and we started to put out records.

Ottawa is a great town for live music.

It is. I feel really fortunate to have started there, because, at the time, it was just an amazing place for punk rock and hardcore, a real tight-knit community. There’s nothing better than being in the community center, or wherever it was, and seeing these bands that are not getting paid much, if anything. It was a small group of people, but man, was it ever the best thing. Those guys and girls just went crazy. It’s what we know, and we can’t really conceive of doing it any other way when we get up there to play.

READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE.