Arcade Fire announces new album WE
The band shared the first single, called"The Lightning I, II," from the upcoming record
Arcade Fire is ready to usher us into a new post-Everything Now era. After announcing a surprise show in New Orleans benefitting Ukraine at the beginning of the week and teasing new music for the past month, Arcade Fire has now revealed what’s coming next: WE. The new album is arriving on May 6 via Columbia Records.
In a message shared in the press release, Win Butler writes,
“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 grint 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 shadows 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 magical 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.”
According to the band, the album is divided between two sides. There’s the first side, “I,” which is “about [their] troubles” and its second side, “WE”, which is about “[their] love for one another.”