🗣️ The sound of a band coming to terms with their 25-year legacy but refusing to be defined by it. Metric’s 10th album arrives 25 years after the Toronto indie icons recorded their first, and the passage of time is certainly not lost on lead singer Emily Haines. “I was a starving artist, but I was fearless,” she reminisces amid the neon glow of the opening “Victim of Luck” before adding, “Now I don’t know what we are.” Romanticize the Dive is the sound of a band coming to terms with the fact that they’re now old enough to be a cog in the 2000s-nostalgia industrial complex, but refusing to be defined by their past. A quarter century into their career, Metric is still coming up with novel ways to reformulate their sound, to the point where typical descriptors like “synth-pop” or “dance rock” feel ill-suited to encompass the Lana Del Rey-goes-Madchester fever dream of “Tremolo” or the operatic post-punk pageantry of “Antigravity.” But for Metric, the evolution is as much philosophical as musical: While the strobe-lit New Orderisms of “Crush Forever” and the LCD-like stutter-funk of “Loyal” hit all the right indie-sleaze pleasure points, the songs are ultimately open-hearted celebrations of long-term romance from a band that’s happy to put their all-night-party days behind them.