Metric

After a nearly four-year lapse between albums that saw singer Emily Haines further collaborate with members of the Broken Social Scene crew and release a couple of stripped-down solo discs, Haines returned to her primary band, Metric, rejuvenated by some time spent in Argentina and inspired by the election of Barack Obama. Not that Metric’s fourth album, Fantasies, sounds particularly hopeful. It’s a gloomy, death obsessed synth-pop record with shades of Blondie and Joy Division. It also looks to be the band’s true breakout. Its lead single, “Help, I’m Alive,” was the group’s first number one single in their native Canada, and it’s also showing legs in America, where it’s climbed up modern-rock charts.