ARCADE FIRE
We COLUMBIA 8/10
The Canadians’ resurgent sixth.
By Jason Anderson
Arcade Fire: shiningalightin chaotic times
ANYONE harbouring the ambition to create a work that encapsulates the chaos and confusion of these times faces a fundamental obstacle: there’s rather a lot to cover. That’s certainly one of the reasons that We – Arcade Fire’s sixth album and first since 2017’s Everything Now – required the most protracted birth process in their two-decade career. In a BBC interview in 2020, frontman Win Butler claimed to have written “records and records” of material while locked down at home. Nor did this torrent stop when they were able to re-enter the world and work on the album in studios in New Orleans, El Paso and Mount Desert Island, Maine, through 2020 and 2021.
Somehow, the band and producer Nigel Godrich honed down this mountain of material to seven songs and 40 minutes. The one song they debuted in the first year of the pandemic – “Generation A”, which they performed on the night of the US presidential election on Late Night With Stephen Colbert – was among those that didn’t make the cut. A 45-minute ambient track released via the meditation app Headspace suggests another of the creative paths not represented here.