With Atlas Vending, METZ – Alex Edkins (guitar & vocals), Hayden Menzies (drums) & Chris Slorach (bass) – not only continue to push their music into new territories of dynamics, crooked melodies, & sweat-drenched rhythms, they explore themes of growing up & maturing within a format typically suspended in youth. Atlas Vending delivers their most dynamic, dimensional, & compelling work yet. less
This 7″ is now being physically released for the first time via Three One G, limited to 1,000 copies, with one side of the vinyl being specially printed by The Black Moon Design, and featuring cover art by Jonathan Bauerle.
“Acid” is a song about having a fresh perspective, a newly widened outlook on the world and one’s life. Being shaken awake from a malaise and realizing there is no time for petty bullshit. Love what you love, love who you love! Embrace it and don’t wait.
Metz shared the video for the second single off Atlas Vending, “Hail Taxi.” If Metz’s current mission is to mirror the inevitable struggles of adulthood, they’ve successfully managed to tap into the conflicted relationship between rebellion and revelry with the song’s tactics of offsetting their signature bombast with anthemic melodic resolutions. “‘Hail Taxi’ is about looking back. The lyrics deal with the idea of reconciling or coming to terms with who you were and who you’ve become,” shares frontman Alex Edkins. The stunning video, directed by A.F. Cortes, heightens these themes and expertly captures the same intensity as the alternately brutal verses and beguiling choruses of “Hail Taxi.” Of the video, Cortes says, “I wanted to tell a simple story that captures the song’s overarching theme. The idea of longing for the past creates many visual motifs and I wanted to create a piece that feels timeless and conveys a sense of isolation, highlighting that while we can hide our feelings, we can’t run from them.”
Check out the stunning video for “Blind Youth Industrial Park,” the latest track from Atlas Vending. The beautifully dystopian video depicts a woman dragging an injured companion on a stretcher through an alien landscape as the pair are tracked by a squad of armed soldiers, and provides sharp contrast to the song, which is an ode to the naivety of youth and the freedom of being unburdened by the world around you.
Shot in Queenstown, on the South Island of New Zealand, “Blind Youth Industrial Park” was directed by Dylan Pharazyn. Here’s Pharazyn on his inspiration for the video: “I started thinking of the feeling of war or samurai films, beautiful but dark and violent… but then I had this idea to work up a more unique world… I started to think of a more futuristic setting — more unusual and dream-like with the story set on a distant planet where there is future technology and some kind of alien magic… like a futuristic fable. I loved the idea of the hero Ayeth on this nomadic walk through an epic landscape… I loved the strength in her and the pairing of her with a wounded companion, something really human and vulnerable… I wanted that emotive warmth countering the cold military images.”
Atlas Vending, the band’s most dynamic, dimensional, and compelling work of their career will be released on October 9th. Bolstered by the co-production of Ben Greenberg (Uniform) and the engineering and mixing skills of Seth Manchester (Daughters, Lingua Ignota, The Body) at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Atlas Vending, the band’s fourth full-length album, sounds massive, articulate, and earnest.
Preorders of Atlas Vending are now available from Sub Pop Records.
“Hail Taxi” by METZ from their album Atlas Vending (Release Date: 10/09/2020)
“Change is inevitable if you’re lucky,” according to Metz frontman and principal songwriter Alex Edkins. And there’s no doubt that the music composed by the Toronto trio is difficult to pin to a specific genre, constantly moving, growing and changing with each album.
“I think what I was trying to say is when you’ve been working with the same people for as long as we have and you’ve been doing music together, it’s easy to get stuck in conventions and ruts and not progress,” he reveals. “I think this record, more than any for us, is something that feels like a really nice progression into new territory. It’s still very much us. We didn’t intentionally set out to change who we are or what we sound like, but I think the production and the songwriting have taken it to a new spot that we’re really proud of.”
Despite being written and recorded prior to the global pandemic, Atlas Vending feels immediate in its response to 2020, clearly poised to attack its themes of social anxiety, isolation and paranoia caused by modern media head on. “Songs like Pulse, and songs like The Mirror, are just so connected to how I’m feeling right now,” Edkins admits, coyly. “It’s [COVID-19] truly shifting the meaning of a lot of the songs for me at least, and I don’t know how people will perceive it. But that’s kind of all you hope, that people take it in, they work it through their situation and maybe it will connect to where they’re at.”
METZ have released a new single entitled “A Boat To Drown In”, taken from their forthcoming album, “Atlas Vending”, due out 9th October.
Atlas Vending comes as the Toronto noise-rock trio’s fourth studio album, following 2017’s Strange Peace, which was recorded with revered engineer Steve Albini. The upcoming release was co-produced by Uniform’s Ben Greenburg and was engineered by Seth Manchester at Pawtucket, Rhode Island studio Machines With Magnets. Released alongside A Boat To Drown In was a music video directed by Tony Wolski.
Speaking of Metz’s upcoming release, guitarist/vocalist Alex Edkins explained in a press release that the band’s goal when approaching their fourth release was to “remain in flux” and “grow in a natural and gradual way”. “Change is inevitable if you’re lucky,” Edkins said. “We’ve always been wary to not overthink or intellectualize the music we love but also not [to be] satisfied until we’ve accomplished something that pushes us forward.” The music made by Edkins and his compatriots Hayden Menzies (drums) and Chris Slorach (bass) has always been a little difficult to pin down. Their earliest recordings contained nods to the teeming energy of early ‘90s DIY hardcore, the aggravated angularities of This Heat, and the noisy riffing of AmRep’s quintessential guitar manglers. but there was never a moment where Metz sounded like they were paying tribute to the heroes of their youth. If anything, the sonic trajectory of their albums captured the journey of a band shedding influences and digging deeper into their fundamental core—steady propulsive drums, chest-thumping bass lines, bloody-fingered guitar riffs, the howling angst of our fading innocence. With Atlas Vending, Metz not only continues to push their music into new territories of dynamics, crooked melodies, and sweat-drenched rhythms, they explore the theme of growing up and maturing within a format typically suspended in youth. Covering seemingly disparate themes such as paternity, crushing social anxiety, addiction, isolation, media-induced paranoia, and the restless urge to leave everything behind, each of Atlas Vending’s ten songs offer a snapshot of today’s modern condition and together form a musical and narrative whole.
Sub Pop Records, the band’s record label, noted that Atlas Vending will mark a change from the band’s previous releases, describing the record as METZ’s most “dynamic, dimensional, and compelling work of their career”.
“While past METZ albums thrived on an abrasive relentlessness, the trio embarked on Atlas Vending with the goal to make a more patient and honest record – something that invited repeated listens rather than a few exhilarating bludgeonings.” “It’s as if the band realised they were in it for the long haul, and their music could serve as a constant as they navigated life’s trials and tribulations.”
“Atlas Vending” by METZ on Sub Pop Records released 9th October
Since releasing their self-titled debut record in 2012, which The New Yorker magazine called, “One of the year’s best albums…a punishing, noisy, exhilarating thing,” the Toronto-based 3-piece METZ have garnered international acclaim as one of the most electrifying and forceful live acts, touring widely and extensively, playing hundreds of shows each year around the world.
Now, Alex Edkins (guitar, vocals), along with Hayden Menzies (drums), and Chris Slorach (bass) are set to unleash their highly-anticipated third full-length album, Strange Peace, an emphatic but artful hammer swing to the status quo.
“The best punk isn’t an assault as much as it’s a challenge — to what’s normal, to what’s comfortable, or simply to what’s expected. Teetering on the edge of perpetual implosion,” NPR wrote in their glowing review of METZ’s 2015 second album, II.
Angular, ear-piercing and provocative. Imagine the clatter of early Sonic Youth brought up to warp speed.
The Fat Angel Sings 