Metric @ The Ritz, Manchester, 19 Nov

Emily Haines and James Shaw are back in Manchester in happier circumstances than their last visit, eighteen months ago.

The pair, who creatively form the beating heart of Metric, chose to join their old friends in Broken Social Scene on the opening, European leg of their comeback tour last year. The first show took place in Manchester, 24 hours after the bombing at the Arena a mile away. The show went on and carried a healing power with it, especially when Johnny Marr made an unannounced guest appearance and Haines took the lead on hugely poignant versions of Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl and Backyards, but ultimately, the lingering feeling was that they were playing to a fairly sparse crowd in a city in mourning.

They’ve kept themselves busy since; Haines worked through her own demons on last September’s underrated second solo record Choir of the Mind, before turning her attentions, along with Shaw, to Art of Doubt, the seventh Metric album and one widely hailed as a return to form – particularly by those less than enamoured with the Toronto outfit’s decision to swap guitars for synths on 2012’s Synthetica and 2015’s Pagans in Vegas.

Accordingly, they sound more like a rock band tonight than they have in a while. Art of Doubt feels most closely tied stylistically to the record that probably represents the band’s high point to date, Fantasies, which turns ten next year. Tracks from the two play off of each other well; Dark Saturday has the same moody strut to it as Sick Muse, and Now or Never Now simmers melodically in a similar manner to Gimme Sympathy – the latter finally back on the setlist in its original full band form, after years of being an acoustic encore staple.

Haines is an irrepressibly energetic presence throughout and is clearly in her element on the new cuts; she leads a boisterous early singalong on Dressed to Suppress, and cuts through her otherwise boilerplate stage banter by dedicating an emotionally charged Anticipate to a couple of fans down the front who she’d already met elsewhere on the continent earlier on this run. The Ritz is a fair way off being full tonight, and yet there’s still the sense that this is the Metric the people want – noisy, confrontational and above all, good fun, even if that means the electronic complexities of their last two records get shuffled to the back of the pack.