It's nearly the end of the year, and Alex Edkins is back in tour mode. "I'm packing my bags for a couple of shows this week in East Coast Canada," he says. "Some of the first Weird Nightmare shows in a long time."

For the better part of two decades, Alex fronted METZ - a band who didn't so much break through as blast through, a storm of noise and energy. Weird Nightmare is something else: fuzzed-out, melodic and deeply personal. Since winding down METZ and relocating, it has been a year of finding new rhythms.

METZ didn't go out quietly, and that's precisely how it should've been. "The final tour was incredible," Alex says. "The fans who supported METZ over the years feel like one giant extended family at this point. We played in so many beautiful places and met so many beautiful people: Iceland, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Russia, South America, Australia, Japan, the EU, the UK, the list goes on.

"We were never what you'd call a 'big' band; we lived on the fringes, we had a lot of success and played all over the world, but it always felt very intimate at the same time.

That same spirit carries into Weird Nightmare, just with a little more melody. His new single 'Forever Elsewhere' is the result of good timing, good people and a need to write something hopeful.

"I recorded it with Seth Manchester [he did the last two METZ records] and Jim Eno [Spoon] co-produced it with me," he explains. "Spoon are such an incredible band and having Jim involved was a real honour. Loel Campbell plays drums [he has played on every WN song] and Roddy Richmond on bass. It has a great live feel because of those guys.

The track's been described as somewhere between Guided By Voices and The Cars. Alex gets the comparison, but it's not exactly deliberate. "Sure. I love those bands," he says. "However, it does feel, with METZ and now with Weird Nightmare, that my influences are mostly subconscious. I've consumed so much music and records that my hope is that my writing does sound like me more than any other band or sound. I'm certainly in love with trying to craft a memorable and catchy hook these days, which I think GBV and The Cars are/were brilliant at in very different ways."

That focus on writing songs that stick hasn't really paused since the first Weird Nightmare album landed in 2022. "I've been writing pretty much non-stop since the first Weird Nightmare LP came out," he says. "I've also been doing my best to take time off the road to focus on family and other projects, but I never really stop writing songs. So I've got a surplus at this point."

But don't go looking for a grand narrative just yet. "I think each song is a snapshot of where you were at that particular point in time, not necessarily an indicator of where you are heading," he says. "But I loved the song when it was written and still do today, so that is all you can hope for."

Where METZ channelled abrasion, Weird Nightmare lets the pop instincts in. "Weird Nightmare is definitely the most singable and catchy music I've ever made," he says. "That melodic sensibility comes very naturally to me. My musical Venn diagram lands somewhere between Husker Du, The Beatles, The Wipers and The Clean."

That doesn't mean Weird Nightmare is all he's up to. "I've been writing music for films lately and have a more cinematic/experimental band called Noble Rot that is a duo with Graham Walsh [Holy Fuck], which allows me to explore a completely different part of the musical brain. I've also been producing records for other bands, and that has kept me endlessly busy and inspired."

And when he's not making music, he's still digging into it. "I love it all. 60s Garage, Psych, R&B, Soul, Dischord Records, Flying Nun, SST - whatever," he says. "Before METZ was touring a lot, my obsession was 60s soul 45s. I would scour the shops in Toronto every weekend and spend hours just searching for something interesting.

This whole chapter, he says, feels like something he had to do. Not to chase anything - just to feel like himself. "I don't feel normal unless I'm writing, recording, and playing shows, and this is exactly the music I want to be making. This is the music that naturally comes out when I reach for a guitar."

Success, then, isn't some abstract idea - it's something that feels right. "METZ were never concerned with someone else's version of success, and I think that's why it worked for as long as it did," he says. "When a band becomes your job, things get complicated, and eventually you all move in different directions, but I'm proud of how we navigated it all. There was a purity of intent there that kept us going.