To go along with Tuesday's release of their fifth studio album, "Synthetica," Metric has premiered the music video for their gleaming, stomping glam-pop single "Youth Without Youth," the lead single from Canadian indie rock band's new record. The foursome rock band is known to grace their albums with at least one standout song. The new tune is no exception, it's a driving, punchy number that vaguely resembles Muse with band's frontwoman Emily Haines at the helm."Youth Without Youth" tackles the subject of a fraying social state through the eyes of a deprived youth, and is about a troubled youth was inspired by the spiraling student loan debt, which at the time it was written had reached $1 trillion in America. Haines said that the track's inspiration "started as just one verse, a very slow, sad story, and the song grew from there. The lyrics trace innocence lost as childlike games grow into teenaged trouble, and these words are buoyed by a glammy, sleazy, danceable sound.
Lyrically, Haines toys with powerful imagery, using phrases like double dutch with a hand grenade, and "rubber soul with a razor blade to describe a young life full of malaise and even criminality. "Youth Without Youth," is far more striking with its funky riff, blending nicely with Haines' honeyed tones, and it is a glam sugar with a bitter core. Perennial indie crush Haines drops a wasted-youth anthem with scarred poetry like 'We played blindman's bluff till they stopped the game,' over a bleak-bubblegum stomp.
Haines ignites some powerful, heady sociopolitical messages atop fuzzed-out electro-rocking melodies and rhythms in Justin Broadbent-Directed clip, which is the most '90s-MTV thing I've seen in a while. It opens with a stomping, strutty beat that ushers in Haines, who's flicking lighters. In a drably colored room, back-in-the-day childhood imagery is juxtaposed with more violent material, mirroring the song's sentiment. There's a girl building a multi-tiered birthday cake, a bunny rabbit, a stuffed animal and football, all interspersed with guns, handcuffs and grenade.
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