A light touch doesn’t come easily to Arcade Fire. But the band is determined to find one on “Everything Now,” its fifth studio album.

From the start, with its debut album, “Funeral,” in 2004, Arcade Fire has pondered matters of life and death, community and solitude, memory and modernity, justice and spirituality. Its first works often aspired to, and reached, passionate arena-rock grandeur.

Yet after its 2010 album, “The Suburbs,” deservedly won the Grammy Award as Album of the Year, Arcade Fire wrenched its music away from rock with “Reflektor” in 2013. It was a double album, signaling a major statement. And if the songs’ concerns were as weighty as ever — eternal love, questions of faith, the power of images — the band and the producer James Murphy, from LCD Soundsystem, pumped in dance-music rhythms, working toward a carnivalesque blend of seriousness and frivolity.