Metric fans have gotten a metric ton of music lately.

The “Gold Guns Girls” outfit has dropped a new record called Formentera II, the follow-up and surprise sequel to their 2022 effort, Formentera.

“We knew it was this big piece, and trying to figure out how to separate it out and whether to announce it as such was kind of a perplexing challenge,” frontwoman Emily Haines tells ABC Audio of the Formentera project. “We ended up going with a surprise release because I just thought it was more fun.”

“I’ve seen other people do it and I was always jealous,” she laughs. “I wanted to be someone who was, like, ‘Surprise! We’ve got another album for you.'”

Metric began work on what would become the two Forementera albums during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, around June 2020. During that time, the band felt a greater freedom to experiment with their sound.

“There was never the feeling, like, any idea was gonna be a waste of time, because all we had was time,” says guitarist Jimmy Shaw. “We kind of explored and explored and explored, and slowly things started to kind of take shape in terms of what was just feeling right to us.”

With both Formenteras, Metric feels they’ve continued to push their indie-rock-meets-electronic style in new directions, as they’ve tried to do throughout their discography.

“We tried to find that Metric middle ground, and we kinda did with [2009’s] Fantasies and [2012’s] Synthetica,” Shaw says. “Then we went back electronic [with 2015’s Pagans in Vegas], and then we had to re-correct again with [2018’s] Art of Doubt, and then we kinda found it again with Forementera I and II.”

He smiles, “So I expect the next one we’ll probably f*** it up again.”

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