TORONTO -- About a year ago, members of Metric were road weary, questioning the direction of their band and at their lowest point, some were feeling "emotionally bankrupt."

Now, the Toronto-based band is preparing to release a new album and is excited to tour again, but it was a long road to their collective catharsis.

For singer Emily Haines, it meant taking a trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina for some time to re-examine her life, which "sucked" as she describes it in a video recently posted on Metric's website.

"I was very unhappy with that place," she says in the video, "so I felt really like the music I was going to write for this next record, which will dictate the next whole chapter of my life, needed to be based in simplicity and just be really genuine."

One of the first songs she wrote in Buenos Aires called "Help, I'm Alive," which is also the name of the band's upcoming new album, hints at the vulnerability she felt with lyrics like, "I tremble/they're gonna eat me alive/if I stumble."

"It pretty much sums up the state that I've been in since I (went to Buenos Aires), since I was honest with myself and accepted that I'm really scared and I don't know where my life is going and I don't know, like, what I'm doing," she said.

"I had actually given up on writing, which I didn't tell anybody that I work with. I just felt like ... nothing was ever going to be cool enough and nothing was ever going to be referential enough, and is either going to sound like somebody else or not sound enough like somebody else."

But a year later, the band has rediscovered its mojo and is excited to be playing live again in the lead up to the release of its fourth album sometime in early 2009.

During a telephone interview, Haines said she feels it's her duty as a artist to speak to fans so openly, although she drew the line at getting any more personal with the issues she was dealing with at the time.

"I'd say that's the point of being an artist for me," she said of posting her confessional video online.

"That's pretty much how we roll, I don't think it's going to surprise anybody."

Guitarist Jimmy Shaw said the whole band was left reeling last year after long stretches of touring and nomadic lifestyles took their toll.

"2007 was a year where we were like,`OK, we need to maybe take one step backwards and get all of our personal lives together a little bit.' We'd been on the road so much before that," said Shaw, recalling that they spent almost 300 days touring during 2006.

"It definitely gets to a point where things get out of balance, you don't really know where home is and you don't really know what you're doing. You start to become a stage machine and the things that are important in life -- like family and community and love and all of these other things -- really start to fall by the wayside and it starts to emotionally bankrupt you."

But Shaw said the band is re-energized by its new material, which he describes as "Fleetwood Mac plays dance rock."

"It's really big, it's expansive and it sounds like it's made in some sort of huge place," he said.

But at the same time, Haines said the songs are based on a simpler approach to writing that the band embraced for the first time.

"The whole principle that we went into this record with was this idea that everything should pass the campfire test and every single song on that record can be played sitting there with an acoustic guitar -- and that was really more challenging than it sounds and we can't really say that for a lot of our previous material," she said.

"I didn't want to write a single note of music if it was just going to be the same thing that I'd already done before, so it's that challenge of not wanting to repeat yourself but also not wanting to lose yourself and turn into somebody else."