ARCADE FIRE - WE VINYL

WE is the first new album by Grammy-nominated indie rockers Arcade Fire in five years. It was produced by longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich along with Arcade Fire's Win Butler and Régine Chassagne. The LP was recorded at studios in New Orleans, El Paso and Mount Desert Island, Maine in mid-2021 following a pandemic period that marked "the longest we've ever spent writing, uninterrupted, probably ever," Butler said in a statement.

The album borrows its title from Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 sci-fi novel We, which would later inspire the dystopian works of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. The seven-song LP is split across two sides, "I" and "WE," respectively, with the first half exploring loneliness and isolation and the latter part celebrating reconnection following, say, a lengthy pandemic.

Joining the septet on the new LP is Peter Gabriel, who provides vocals alongside Chassagne on WE's "Unconditional II (Race and Religion)"; Gabriel previously covered the band's Neon Bible song "My Body Is a Cage" for his 2010 covers album Scratch My Back. "I'd listen to his songs on the radio growing up, and they were the only places outside of my house where I'd hear drums that sounded like my family's music," Chassagne said of Gabriel in a statement.

Ahead of WE's release, Arcade Fire have shared the video for the album's first single "The Lightning I, II." The Emily Kai Bock-directed visual for the two-part song begins with the collective staging an outdoor concert, but as the music picks up, so does the weather, with Butler forced to dodge winds and a tornado. After the force of nature, Arcade Fire pick up their destroyed instruments and continue on with their performance.