1. No Cars Go

The Canadian group’s founding members are anything but ordinary: in Win Butler, they had a Texas-raised, goofy, 6ft 3in boarding-school kid who would later be dubbed a “Serbian basketball player” by Tina Fey. The other half of the husband-wife team was Régine Chassagne, a daughter of Haitian refugees, who fled to Montreal during the dictatorship of François Duvalier. These two are best known for being backed by a round-robin of cellists, violinists, multi-instrumentalists of all shapes and sizes. It didn’t start that way, however. The apocalyptic No Cars Go, a song from second album Neon Bible, began as a cut from their self-titled EP. The release was launched in March 2003 with a show at Montreal’s Casa del Popolo, defined by tensions boiling over into an onstage bust-up. At the time, they were the opposite of the life-affirming oddballs cherished today.

2. Wake Up

It was only through Butler and Chassagne’s persistence that Arcade Fire did not die an early death. Wake Up, released in 2004, was written “in reaction to the band breaking up”, Butler told Exclaim in the same year. Perhaps this sense of finality fed into the deathly embrace of their debut album, Funeral, a record that helped turn these mismatched, nearly defunct musicians into one of the biggest groups in the world. Wake Up remains their calling card: grippingly charged with emotions and built to be sung back by tens of thousands. By dint of its success, it’s also responsible for many rotten pastiches – the Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men, Coldplay’s dress sense on Viva La Vida. But it’s authenticity remains. Instead of serving its purpose as a break-up song, it ended up being one that brings people together.



3. Haiti

Throughout their rise, Arcade Fire have remained rooted to Haiti. Chassagne co-founded Kanpe, a not-for-profit helping rural Haitian families in poverty. And to this day, for every ticket sold at an Arcade Fire show, $1 goes towards Partners in Health, which helps poor and marginalised people. Funeral deals with death in many ways – from initial grief to how it affects those around us – and both Butler and Chassagne lost grandparents during its making. For Chassagne, the record’s most personal song is Haiti, which refers to the loved ones she lost in the Jérémie Vespers massacre of 1964. She sings: “Mes cousins jamais nés hantent les nuits de Duvalier,” which translates to, “My unborn cousins haunt Duvalier’s nights.” Vocals were recorded in her bathroom, because she found the song too personal to sing in the studio. Fifty seconds in, you can hear her hitting the stop button on a tape recorder. Despite its stamp on Funeral, the real sound of the country appears most strongly on the group’s most recent record, Reflektor. Here Comes the Night Time, with its street-parade cacophony, brings the spirit of Haiti to life.

The album title track is Arcade Fire’s most starriest moment: a James Murphy-produced, seven-minute epic so good that guest vocalist David Bowie jokingly threatened to steal it. At festival performances last year, Butler looked to the sky when singing Bowie’s line: “Thought you were praying to the resurrector / Turns out it was just a reflector.” For all Reflektor’s funky strut and sheer scale, it focused in on a modern fear – technology’s grip. What was poignant in 2013 has only taken on more relevance over the last four years.



5. The Suburbs

Like any successful band, Arcade Fire have their critics; those who consider their disorderly racket to be a tired formula. Without question, Funeral saw them arriving at the right time. Indie rock was designed for the fringes until 2004, when Arcade Fire helped steer bigger audiences toward the work of Neutral Milk Hotel and Broken Social Scene. Funeral still conveys raw feeling like few other records. On The Suburbs, they replicate that magic. A portrait of lost youth, empty days and first loves formed on the fringes of bigger towns, it’s a beautiful glimpse into an easily forgotten simple life. This, the album’s opening track introduces tales of war and the corruption of innocence – cheery themes that crop up as the album progresses.

Reflektor’s technology-is-bad-maybe crusade was foreseen in Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). A glistening, Blondie-like classic, it finds Chassagne trying to find like-minded souls in the dead end of copy’n’paste, commercialised towns. “Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains,” she chants, referring to William Gibson’s theory that all cities will eventually merge into one blanket, urbanised “sprawl”. For all the doom and gloom, it remains one of Arcade Fire’s most light-footed, uplifting songs.



7. Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)

Despite The Suburbs’ vivid portrayal of forgotten towns – fleshed out by Spike Jonze in his short film Scenes from the Suburbs – nothing quite taps into the intimacy of life at home like Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels). Over five minutes, a dramatic scene unfolds in which Butler plans his escape from a broken family. He wants to grow his hair, build tunnels in the snow and take a great leap from reality. This was most people’s introduction to Arcade Fire, and it perfectly encapsulates their skill for sending everyday tales skywards.

8. Month of May

It’s a divisive track among fans, but Month of May deserves inclusion because it shows a different side to the howling, barbaric force they’re known for. Dumb, repetitive, structured, simple to a T, it’s a complete outlier on the Suburbs devise track – a rude interruption that sounds like a razor-toothed punk song compared with the rest of the record’s floaty, rural stretch. “First they built the road, then they build the town, that’s why we’re still driving around,” bounds Butler, delirious surrounded by all this drudgery. What might sound like a straightforward rock song is one of Arcade Fire’s most experimental, daring moves yet.

9. Normal Person

Reflektor saw Arcade Fire grappling with the idea of entering a new decade as one of the world’s biggest bands. Without compromising their barmy, emotion-led founding spirit, they’d wound up as permanent headliners, arena giants. Were they left with no room to grow? The resulting record was as grandiose a statement as they could possibly make, but the group also scratched an itch to go back to basics. In the lead-up to Reflektor’s release, they played hushed, intimate gigs under a pseudonym (the Reflektors), hiding their true selves under giant papier-mache heads. Normal Person opens with Butler at a loss, chanting: “Do you like rock’n’roll music? / Cause I don’t know if I do,” over waves of broken feedback and sparse claps, the kind you’d find when Arcade Fire used to play to 20 people, not 20,000. From there, the song lifts from gloomy dive bars to the stadiums they belong in, sporting wild guitar solos and euphoric synths, once again proving these guys are a million miles from normal.



Funeral’s penultimate song is just shy of Wake Up in the spiritual, universally loved stakes. Nothing feels quite as cathartic as chanting the latter’s choruses in a muddy field like it might be your final gasp. The same applies to Rebellion (Lies), where cries of “Lies! Lies!” can border on aggressive. Particularly now, in an age of false pledges and fake news; perhaps the song will take greater prominence as it lives on. Both as an act of resistance and a window into childlike naivety, it’s a calling card for living life to its fullest potential, even in times of torment.



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