The Montreal group Arcade Fire took advantage of the burst of spring to unveil a new song entitled The Lightning I, II and announce his return, four years after the end of the tour of his previous album, Everything Nowreleased in 2017. On May 6, the orchestra will launch WEa sixth career album produced by Régine Chassagne, Win Butler and longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich.
Accompanied by a music video, the song The Lightning I, II will already reassure the fans of the group: in its form as well as in the unshakable hope for a better future that runs through its text (“The sky is breaking open, we keep hoping / In the distance, we’ll see a glow / Lightning light our way / ‘Til the black sky turns back to indigo”), we recognize the ardor of the Arcade Fire of the albums neon bible (2007) and The Suburbs (2010). A return to form, therefore, for the orchestra which, after having successfully explored a more synthetic rock on the double album Reflector (2013), got lost with a high-sounding concept and disoriented songs about the unloved Everything Now.
Two-part song (or two songs in one), The Lightning I, II begins with a certain restraint, wrapping its groove in opulent orchestrations of strings, punctuated by the upright piano chords plated by Régine Chassagne, who places from the first seconds this kind of unifying melodic theme which has made the group famous since the the start of her career.
Halfway through the approximately six minutes that the extract lasts, the machine races, launched by Win chanting “one, two, three, go! “, a call to which drummer Jeremy Gara responds with enthusiasm, while the black and white images of the music video follow Win Butler walking against the wind in the streets of New Orleans, the sky threatened by the trunk of a tornado. Nine years after realizing that of the song AfterlifeToronto’s Emily Kai Bock signs this fiery clip dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased mother of multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry.
Via a press release, Arcade Fire’s record label provided more details about the sixth album, billed as “a concise 40-minute epic” inspired “as much by the forces that threaten to pull us apart from those we we love” than by “the urgency of overcoming them”. In an interview yesterday with the BBC, Win Butler specified that the title of the new album, WE, was inspired by that of a dystopian novel by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin published in 1920, and that a concert tour was in preparation.
The “I” side of the album will have three songs, then four on the “WE” side. At a benefit concert for Ukrainian refugees the band performed at the small Toulouse Theater in New Orleans last Monday, Arcade Fire presented three of the seven new songs: Age of Anxiety I when the curtain rises, Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)Then The Lightning I, II. According to the digital media Stereogum, Peter Gabriel would sing a duet with Régine on the song entitled Unconditional II (Race and Religion) placed on the second side of the album.
The band’s fans had been on the lookout for a few weeks already, some of them having received in the mail an enigmatic postcard bearing the band’s logo. Each card bore the phrase “WE missed you”, accompanied by musical staves of a song yet to be unveiled.