Curve (album)
Curve is the eighth studio album by Canadian alternative rock band Our Lady Peace (OLP), released on April 3, 2012. The album was recorded from 2010 through 2012 at vocalist Raine Maida's home recording studio. "Curve"'s first single, "Heavyweight", was released on December 20, 2011. The music from "Curve" has been touted by lead singer Maida as being "more experimental and ambitious" than the band's 2000 concept album "Spiritual Machines". The album's cover features Canadian heavyweight boxer George Chuvalo, whose vocal excerpts are featured in the album's tenth and final track "Mettle". The  album debuted at No.9 on the Canadian Albums Chart. This is the last album to feature drummer Jeremy Taggart, who left the band in June 2014. The time between "Curve"'s release and the band's 2018 album "Somethingness" marked the longest gap between Our Lady Peace studio albums to date, at nearly 6 years. Development. The band began recording "Curve" about six months after the release of their seventh studio album, "Burn Burn". As with "Burn Burn", the album was recorded at Raine Maida's studio in Los Angeles and is not attached to a major record label. Fans  were provided with unprecedented live footage of the band recording the album via Ustream throughout early to mid-2011. Band members also provided live updates on the progress of the album, including song titles and lyrics, via Twitter and Facebook. Artistic direction. "Curve"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s artistic direction was inspired by the band's 2010 "Clumsy" and "Spiritual Machines" tour, as well as by constructive criticism from a friend of the band's, Jason Lader, who later became producer of the album. When Lader was shown some early working material from the album, he criticized it, saying "why don't you make  a record that "you" would listen to?". This prompted the band to scrap all of the material they'd written and recorded up to that point, and to start over fresh. The band has stated that they pushed the creative boundaries as much as possible with "Curve"'s music. In a late 2011 interview, lead singer Maida was quoted as saying, "when we look back at what we respect about what we've done, whether it's things from "Naveed" or things from "Spiritual Machines", it's tapping into those feelings and trying to find that place again where we  exist as artists, and the record really goes deep into those spaces, so it's getting back to what I think the best parts of this band are." He added, "I think people are gonna be pretty surprised where this record goes". Critical reception. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 49 (based on four reviews) indicating the reception of the album has been 'mixed'. Track listing. The official track list was revealed through "Curve"'s entry on Amazon.com in March 2012. Curve (album