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“When I called him, he was wondering why a producer was calling a guitar player and I explained that I didn’t want to do it anymore, that I needed to rejoin the band as the guitar player and be on the same side of the glass,” said Shaw.

“Every single record we’ve made I’ve ignored the guitar because I’m producing the rest of the record and with him there, I could forget about the tuning of the snare, the questionable second verse or the bass part and just focus on the guitar. We wanted to return to the rock band Metric, not the band of Cascades and Synthetica, and I needed to be able to play guitar to do that.”

As is often the case with a band that has 20 years and seven albums to its credit, going back means going into the future. While Shaw’s playing certainly shines all over Art of Doubt, it also finds Emily Haines doing some of the most committed singing of her career. Shaw says that’s one of the nice surprises that came with relinquishing the creative reins a little.

“Again, one of the things Justin did was to completely un-labour anything so she could sing the song three times and would be going ‘OK, I’m ready to do now,’ and he would be saying ‘to lunch, out for a walk, we’re done here,’ ” said Shaw. “We’ve never worked with someone who operated like that and her being able to sing off the cuff discovered whole new depths to her instrument. With 20 years of playing together, this last tour I heard her singing better than ever before.”

Photo by Handout

In keeping with this loosening up of the “Metric method,” the new material is coming alive on stage in ways nothing did from Pagans in Vegas. That album proved hard to play live, and the new songs are all working. Initially, Haines wasn’t feeling Underline the Black. Now it’s a mainstay.