When you know you’ll be playing the same songs every night, looking into the same crowds of anonymous faces, zipping up the same gold lam? jumpsuit, you do what you can to keep life surprising.

As Metric frontwoman Emily Haines has said in the past, releasing a new album can feel like writing the script you’ll follow for the next few years (three years in Metric’s most recent case, the amount of time they toured behind 2005’s Live it Out). “I think I always just knew that to be true,” says Haines, taking a break from a band photo shoot. “With every record we’ve made, we’ve toured it for two or three years,” she says -– to say nothing of singles like “Combat Baby” that has found its way into every set since its 2003 debut date. “The principle on this record was definitely we wanted to create a feeling, a positive feeling that we could inhabit for the next little while.”

That album would be Fantasies, in stores this week although the band’s hosted a live stream of all 10 tracks on their MySpace page since March.

Previous album Live it Out built the band’s profile, going two-times platinum in Canada. But three years on the road left Metric “exhausted and disoriented,” says Haines –- and the bad vibes were only exacerbated by the state of the world around them. Two terms of George W. Bush took its toll on the band’s worldview, she says. “There was not really much hope for things to improve.” The raw defeatism was evident in even the most raucous of songs. Think back to the album’s lead single, “Monster Hospital,” and its mob-ready chorus: "I fought the war, I fought the war, and the war won!"

“When we were working on [Fantasies] it definitely felt like, ‘OK, we’re coming out of this time,’” she says.

“And we wanted to convey that sense of looking forward and dreaming instead of doing what we did in the past, which we felt necessary at the time. I don’t think anyone needs a list of what’s wrong with the world right now,” she says with a dry laugh. “I think the list is pretty well publicized at this point.”

“Sometimes music’s a bit like fashion, you know, where people are working on the fall collection while we’re all still wearing the spring from the previous year,” she says. “And we were just optimistic that it would be an improved place. And I think we were right.”

Not that Fantasies is all sunshine and disco balls -– which Haines is quick to clarify. “I mean, don’t worry. Metric’s never going to be the kind of band that’s just like, ‘actually, we’re going to put a smiley face on the cover of our album,’” she says.

And indeed, Fantasies melds seamlessly with the gritty-and-glittery mid-tempo dance-rock of their previous two albums Old World Underground… Where Are You Now (2003) and Live it Out (2005). Synths and electro-pop touches might not thrill the same as they did in the early 2000s, but the hooks on songs such as the heavenly “Sick Muse” and current single “Gimme Sympathy” beat anything in their back catalogue.

But before the band got to that point, Haines says they “wrote an entire record” in 2007 and then started over from scratch. Writing with “optimism” proved a challenge. “We scrapped all the songs with the exception of -– I think it was ‘Gimme Sympathy,’” she explains.

“You’ve got to want to stand behind it and it didn’t feel like we were saying something new, it felt like we were repeating ourselves and we have too much respect for our listeners to put them through that.”

The solution was taking a time out from the band, or as Haines puts it, time to “tend to the human side of our existence.” Guitarist Jimmy Shaw opened a Toronto recording studio with fellow indie-rocker Sebastian Grainger. Bass player Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key went on tour with their other band, Bang Lime. Haines fled to Argentina –- one of the few places she’d wanted to visit where she knew she wouldn’t know anyone -– and eventually defeated her writer’s block.

So far, Metric’s new script is holding up, says Haines. They’ve road-tested Fantasies for months now –- including on their last Canadian tour, just this past December.

The band plays the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival April 24 -– and while it’s just one of several upcoming Canadian dates, it’s one of the only shows fans can pay to see. Earlier this week the band announced five shows which they’re calling “intimate, acoustic dates” -– and the only way in is to win tickets through radio station contests or draws being held through Metric’s official website.

Says Haines -– who also hints that “there’s going to be a few more surprises to come” -– the band decided to run an unconventional tour “because we’re an unconventional band and we like to do things in an unconventional way. … There are songs on Fantasies that we want to play in multiple ways in multiple settings and we’re really having fun doing unconventional performances.”

Metric play the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival in Whistler, B.C. April 24.

Fantasies is in stores now.

Canadian tour dates include:

April 14, Toronto
April 16, Montreal (In-store performance at Apple Store)
April 20, Winnipeg
April 21, Edmonton
April 22, Calgary
April 23, Vancouver
April 24, Whistler (Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival)
April 25, Victoria
June 20, Toronto (Edge Fest)

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