Arcade Fire Announce New Album, Share Video for New Song “The Lightning I, II”

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Arcade Fire Announce New Album, Share Video for New Song “The Lightning I, II”

WE Due Out May 6 via Columbia

Mar 17, 2022 By Mark Redfern Photography by Michael Marcelle

Arcade Fire have announced a new album, WE, and shared its first single, “The Lightning I, II,” via a video for it. WE is the band’s first new album in five years and is due out May 6 via Columbia. Emily Kai Bock directed the black & white video for “The Lightning I, II.” Watch it below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

WE is the band’s sixth studio album and the follow-up to 2017’s Everything Now. In the last five years various members of the band have kept busy with solo albums and side projects. In 2019 the band also contributed a cover of “Baby Mine” to Tim Burton’s remake of Dumbo.

Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne produced WE with Nigel Godrich. The album was recorded in New Orleans, El Paso, and Mount Desert Island. A press release says the album’s seven songs are split into “two distinct sides,” with the first side titled “I” and “channeling the fear and loneliness of isolation” and the second side titled “WE” and “expressing the joy and power of reconnection.”

In the press release, Win Butler says that working on WE was “the longest we’ve ever spent writing, uninterrupted, probably ever.”

Win Butler also issued this statement about the album, shared via an image (which is also below):

“My grandmother read me a book when I was a little kid that had the word ‘WE’ stamped into its cover in broken 1920s gold leaf

As my eyes grew heavy, in the bedroom my father slept in as a child, I wondered…

What is ‘WE’? Who are ‘WE’?

There are questions that can rattle around in your head for a lifetime…
but once in a while the centuries grind to a halt
and WE are given the precious time
to ask again in our child-like inner voice
What is ‘WE’?

Hiding in the shadow of Carl Jung
is the WE that holds each other back
and tears each other down
the WE that whispers secrets
and complains about paradise
even heaven is too cold…

But also it is the ‘ONE’ of Marley, the Buddha and Abraham
it’s the lightning strike
of our magic mutual creation
it’s the root
WE share
made of the same dust as the stars
WE pray to

It’s the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.
and the iron of the nail on the church door of his namesake
it’s the innocence and the mistake
the universal flaw and the perfect imperfection

The hipsters called it jazz

The hippies called it love

And we call it WE”