Canadian punk band Metz celebrates new Sub Pop album with Bay Area shows
One of Canada's most celebrated modern-rock bands visits the Bay Area this weekend when Metz brings its current tour to promote their new album Up On Gravity Hill to San Jose and San Francisco.
One of the leading lights of punk in North America in the past 16 years, Canadian trio Metz was formed in Ottowa in 2008 by guitarist/singer Alex Edkins, bassist Chris Slorach and drummer Hayden Menzies. The band quickly developed its tuneful take on noise-rock indebted to the sounds of the Jesus Lizard, Drive Like Jehu and early Nirvana through its early live performances and a string of singles recorded for Toronto-based imprint We Are Busy Bodies Records.
Those kinetic, pile-driving tunes and the band's reputation for ferocious onstage delivery would earn the group a deal with Sub Pop Records, which released Metz's eponymous debut album. Clocking in at just under a half an hour, the explosive effort earned the band wide praise and was nominated for Canada's Polaris Music Prize in 2013.
Over the course of the trio's subsequent three albums for the label, Metz has largely stuck to its original template of mixing corrosive, desperate riffs with flashes of surprisingly catchy melodies while working with a couple of noise-rock icons along the way. They collaborated with Drive Like Jehu/Hot Snakes/Rocket From the Crypt guitarist John Reis on a two-song single in 2016 and had legendary engineer Steve Albini record their third album Strange Peace that came out the following year.
Sub Pop issued the compilation Automat that collected some of the threesome's hard-to-find singles and unreleased early material in 2019 to appease fans while Metz worked on their fourth album. Atlas Vending was released in 2020 and pushed the band's into more experimental territory -- sometimes recalling Sonic Youth -- while retaining its signature locomotive energy. Amid the pandemic shutdown that kept the band home when they would have been touring, Sub Pop this past summer released Live at the Opera House, an audio and video document that ably captures the relentless intensity of a Metz performance.
Another diversion during the COVID-forced downtime would be Weird Nightmare, Edkins's solo project that takes a more pop-minded approach to indie rock on its debut album that was issued by Sub Pop in 2022. That melodic sense colors the trio's latest collection of new songs recently released by the imprint, Up On Gravity Hill. Tempering the corrosive aggression of Metz's earlier recordings with a soaring, shoegaze-influenced sound, the new effort features a broader musical palette thanks to contributions from guests Owen Pallett on violin and backing vocals from Amber Webber (Black Mountain, Lightning Dust) to go with a lyrical focus on coping with grief and loss.
Metz finally returns to the Bay Area this week for the first time since playing the New Parish in Oakland as part of a 2022 tour marking the tenth anniversary of their eponymous debut album. Joining the band for a run of West Coast dates is Gouge Away, a like-minded noisy post-punk quintet founded Florida that is similarly mixing more sedate shoegaze sounds with urgent hardcore anthems on their acclaimed new album Deep Sage. The bands play the Ritz in San Jose Friday before coming to the Chapel in San Francisco's Mission District Saturday night.
Metz and Gouge Away
Friday, May 3, 8 p.m. $22-$25
The Ritz
Saturday, May 4, 8 p.m. $25-$28
The Chapel
