By Kavit Sumud | February 17th, 2013
“Breathing Underwater” is part of a new era of Metric songs (post-Fantasies) that’s about escaping off the island of you, and bursting through the artificial boundaries that define yourself from the rest of the world. I remember when I saw Emily Haines perform in this intimate little garage for 40 people or so in Seattle during the Live it Out tour, and the exhaustion of carrying the sentiment of songs like “Empty” was palpable within her.
There is a point where being mired in the ocean of your own pain, you might just grow gills and swim in that ocean like its reality. That idea for Metric carries back to 2009 and can be found in the music video documentary for the single “Help, I’m Alive” (I’ve watched that some 400+ times to this day–its beautiful). In it, Emily discusses escaping to Buenos Aires to find a life uncomplicated and the freedom that journey transpired.
It took me awhile to get to the same place as Emily, and therefore I didn’t quite connect with the Fantasies and Synthetica catalogue until now. But at the right moment in my life, comes this spectacular remix by MNDR that’ll take any Metric fan and surface them out of their own ocean through chillstep currents, blasting them right into Emily’s stratosphere.
Free download at Metric’s Soundcloud.