Weird Nightmare’s Alex Edkins Finds His Soft Side in the Chaos

Alex Edkins has spent two decades making noise. As the frontman of METZ, he built a career on controlled chaos, a hardcore sound that felt like a building collapsing in slow motion. But that’s not the whole story. His side project Weird Nightmare, which started in 2022, reveals a different side of the same musician: someone who writes pop songs, who hums melodies, who lets the light in.

His second album under the name, Hoopla, arrives this year. It’s bigger and bolder than the debut, with a wider sonic palette and more layered arrangements. But the real shift is in the subject matter. Edkins moved back to Ottawa recently with his wife and young child, returning to the city where both grew up. That dislocation, the strangeness of settling down after years on the road, runs through these songs.

The album’s impetus came from an unlikely source. Edkins says a Paul McCartney concert he attended years ago planted a seed. Watching a Beatle play to a stadium full of people made him realize that pop music, done right, carries its own weight. It doesn’t need to be loud to be powerful. That idea stayed with him, even as METZ kept pushing its own extremes.

Hoopla is peppered with bittersweet details about transience, about leaving one life for another. There’s a tenderness in the writing that feels earned, not forced. Edkins doesn’t abandon his edge. He just learns to aim it differently. The guitars still bite. The rhythms still drive. But now there’s space for a chorus to breathe, for a melody to settle in.

What makes Weird Nightmare worth watching is this tension. Edkins is a punk musician who writes pop songs, a noise artist who values clarity, a loud person who found quiet. Hoopla doesn’t resolve that contradiction. It just lets it play out across ten tracks, each one a small negotiation between chaos and control.