Emily Haines was in something less than a full-out rock ’n’ roll environment when it hit her.

“I was in New York a few weeks ago and I went to this yoga class,” Metric’s front woman recalls. “Near the end, the teacher mentioned she was going to Canada. It was the funniest thing ever … literally the whole room piped up. Suddenly all these people who’ve been silent and posing are saying ‘I love Canada!’ ‘Me too! I love Canadians!'

“I was just laughing, because living in New York for six years where it was, like, secretly Canadian — it’s kind of an ongoing joke, but it wasn’t funny to me. Especially as an artist, it was Canadian musicians and actors just being completely mocked to their face.”

Compare that to the write-up in this week’s New Yorker — which declares her “bony, telegenic, and whip-smart” and calls Metric’s sound “a taut version of rock that respects hooks and disdains lassitude” — and you can see how much things have changed.

For her part in advancing the Canadian scene, not only is Haines fronting one of the most buzzed-about bands in the country, currently releasing what could (and should) prove one of the most acclaimed albums of the year; she also lends her talents to Broken Social Scene, helps out various members of that collective with their own projects, and is preparing to release a solo album of her own.

“To me, those things come very naturally,” she says of her different musical personas. “I’m in town, and my friends are musicians and they make records and they want me to be a part of it. That’s a much more natural way to be a musician than being corporate constructions of types of people placed in close proximity to each other in order to attract the right demographic.”

But as successful as her multi-tasking may be, it’s with Metric — now based in Toronto, where she and co-founding guitarist James Shaw hail from, after a nomadic existence of several years — that she might just be taking the Canadian scene to a whole new place.

Indie rock, at least in this country, is supposed to be sexless. Glamour and artistic integrity, the unspoken rules tell us, cannot co-exist. But Haines is a rule-breaker.

Nobody would accuse Metric of dumbing down their music, nor of being motivated by commercial interests over artistic ones. Their new album, Live It Out, is actually more challenging than 2003’s Old World Underground — its subversive lyrics at least as cryptic, its messages more conflicted, its musical styles far more diverse than the dancy synth-rock the previous disc favoured.

But Haines also embraces the classic notion of rock ’n’ roll much more than many of her contemporaries. And a few years ago, she began a bold experiment into just how well an indie ethic and a rock-star persona can mesh.

Initially, it was mostly about breaking Metric out of a rut. “When we went to Los Angeles and recorded the first record, we needed to step it up,” she recalls. “We were a pretty boring band before, and we knew it.”

And so Haines abandoned what she’s described elsewhere as “the school of indie rock asexuality,” beginning to combine her unique vocal style — intermittently approachable and edgy, innocent and highly sensual — with an aggressive stage persona built around glamour, charisma, sexual energy and a hint of irony. “I feel like I pushed myself way out on a limb, and it was not entirely comfortable,” she says. “But I feel like it was important that I test myself and the limits of what was actually happening in the room.”

The entire band, she insists, is moving in the same direction — and it's true, Metric is beginning to harness a raw stage power rarely seen from Canadian acts. But it’s Haines who’s at the forefront of challenging what legitimate artists are supposed to look and act like, and that means trying to figure out just how to chart the course she’s started.

“The challenge for me right now is that I really like that side of rock ’n’ roll,” she says. “I think there needs to be the glamorous side. But I’m trying to figure out how to continue that, and even go further, without finding myself down exactly the same road as I’ve watched my rock-star friends, where you’re on stage gloating that you made all this money and you’re a rock star. It’s kind of like the politician who gets elected and then forgets who elected him.”

Then there’s the delicate line between being a star who preaches individualism and one who preaches materialism. “I like fashion,” she says. “I think it’s important, especially for girls, to find ways to feel like themselves and express themselves and look good. How to represent that without becoming someone who’s advocating just being trendy ... it’s an interesting dilemma, but I think I can do it.”

If she’s able to strike the right balance, Haines might just push the boundaries of indie rock as much as anyone on this continent — something that would really get them talking in Manhattan’s yoga classes. But never one to get pigeonholed, she throws even that theory for a bit of a loop.

“Indie rock is supposed to be completely devoid of sex,” the genre’s emerging sex symbol says. “But I don’t think we’re necessarily an indie-rock band. We’re just a band that hasn’t sold any records yet.”