THERE are many reasons for never having heard of the indie band Metric. For one thing they’re from Canada.
And even though the band members shared a Williamsburg loft space with members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV on the Radio in the early ’00s, they didn’t make their way up as part of the New York scene — they were also based in London, Montreal and Los Angeles before resettling in Toronto.
But now you have no excuse. Metric’s newest album, “Fantasies,” topped Billboard’s Heatseekers charts, and the song “Front Row” scored a spot on “Grey’s Anatomy.”
It wasn’t an overnight success, but for Metric, which performs tomorrow at Terminal 5, the rise to the top has been anything but conventional.
Emily Haines (who fronts the band and plays keyboards) and guitarist Jimmy Shaw are both also a part of Toronto music collective Broken Social Scene, and together they founded the electronically minded rock band a decade ago in Toronto.
After the 2005 CD “Live It Out” was released, they performed for huge crowds at Coachella and were courted by every major record label.
” ‘Live It Out’ was successful on a certain scale, but so many people had never heard of the band or the record,” says Haines. “We definitely felt capable of doing more.”
It might sound counterintuitive, but to grow their fan base — and record sales — the band went the same route as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: nixing a major label deal and releasing “Fantasies” independently.
Simply put, they didn’t want what a traditional label offered.
“The old model of a musician being so grateful to get 23 cents a record — and what you have to give up in exchange for that — is completely antiquated,” says Haines.
“Honestly, I felt one day, someone was going to walk in and say, ‘Baby, you’re a star. I’m going to take you all away,’ but it’s an old idea. It requires, on the part of musician, a permanent adolescent lack of understanding of what’s going on.” With money earned while touring, the band — who opened for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden in 2006 — was able to finance its album. They also built a Toronto studio filled with Shaw’s equipment.
“We went independent so we could be big,” Haines says.
“It was exhilarating and scary. At the end of the process, we found ourselves with a finished record.”
And the results? So far, so good. “Fantasies” is on its way to becoming Metric’s best-selling album. It topped the CMJ radio charts for weeks, boosted by the first single, “Help, I’m Alive.”
“We just want to live our lives and make records and experience things and write decent things about that, so people can connect to you,” says Haines.
As for the title, Haines, has a rule that a name should have three meanings. “Fantasies means different things for different people,” she says. “I like the sinister side. You can find yourself in all kinds of difficult situations if your reality slides into fantasy.”
For Shaw, the name
represents the “big and dreamy” sound of the album, Haines says. Then, of course, there’s the sexier “Hey what’s your fantasy?” interpretation. Sounds like Metric has succeeded in making its own “Fantasies” come true.
marymhuhn@nypost.com