Metric's 2022 album Formentera was written and recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it plays out like a tormented dispatch from deep in the heart of the despair, uncertainty, and gloom of that particular period paired with some of the most inventive and inspiring music of the band's long career. The group wrote more songs than they were able to finish and release on that album, so they made a push to do that, working at the famed Motorbass studios while on tour in France to add the final touches. The resulting Formentera II, despite its title, is far more than just a second helping made up of songs not good enough to make the cut on the previous album. Everything here is strong enough to have been there, and they all share a very similarly dark, almost broken, outlook, dealing not with heartbreak of a romantic nature but almost a breakup with the world itself. Tracks like "Days of Oblivion" make this overall malaise pretty clear, but others also come across like synth pop goodbye notes ("Stone Window"), fierce alt-rock kiss-offs ("Suckers"), or too-numb-to-care-anymore laments ("Go Ahead and Cry"). It gets so bleak that Metric take a crack at an acoustic guitar ballad on "Nothing Is Perfect." What could have been a cliched mess actually becomes a thing of beauty as they imbue the song with tattered glamour, a gentle melody, and one of Emily Haines' most touching vocals. When she harmonizes with her Auto-Tuned self on the chorus, it's a moment of pure magic that's almost beautiful enough to blunt the pain the words impart. Along with these songs where the band continue to dig deeply into sadness and suffering, there are a few moments where the sun threatens to shine through the cracks in the door that they've shut tight against the terrors outside. "Detour Up" is a sparkling pop song with a rollicking electronic rhythm, a sweetly spry Haines vocal, and a rippling guitar solo, and "Just the Once" verges on disco. It's the track with the highest quotient of French magic; the choruses sound like they were dusted liberally with Parisian glitter. Sure, the lyrics aren't exactly happy, but dancing with tears in one's eyes can still liberate a busted heart and bruised soul. The entire album, like Formentera before it, is oddly liberating as the group balls up all the pain, fear, unease and frustration of one of the more difficult times in recent memory and repurposes it as danceable, shoutable, thoroughly compelling and meaningful art. Metric have always been the kind of band to take big emotions and make them sound stadium-sized. On these two albums, they take stadium-sized emotions and make them painfully real and bleedingly human. ~ Tim Sendra