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Artist News Releases
Arcade Fire announce new album We
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 18 March 2022
Arcade Fire are back! It’s been a while. Their last album, ‘Everything Now’, came out in 2017. Five years later, in the year of our Lord 2022, they will release their sixth studio album ‘We’.
The first single – ‘Lightning I, II’ – was recorded in El Paso, Texas “in the shadow of the Mexican border wall, which lay unfinished at the edge of the property”, as the results of the 2020 US presidential election came in, recalls frontman Win Butler.
“It was peak COVID”, he goes on. “El Paso was the epicentre in the US at that time, they were using prison inmates to move bodies to the overfull morgues, because the healthcare system was completely overwhelmed”.
“I’ll never forget finishing the take and walking straight to our outdoor communal space where we had screwed a television into a tree so we could watch election results outside, to see the news that Trump had lost the election”, he continues.
“The emotion in the vocal was inspired by the Haitian immigrants that were amassing on the US border, after boarding ships from Haiti and walking from as far as Brazil for a chance at freedom, only to be met with whips and dogs and officers on horseback”.
“I was lyrically inspired by the optimism I see in my child living in paradise ‘beneath a poison sky’”, he concludes. “But mostly we wanted to play the song so fast and hard that you can’t breathe when it’s over… with the realisation that you can’t win them all, even when you give it all”.
Produced by Butler, Régine Chassagne and Nigel Godrich, ‘We’ will be released on 6 May. Watch the video for ‘Lightning I, II’ here:
