How Arcade Fire Found a Way Back

There are a few indicators that Win Butler, the singer and guitarist who fronts the rock band Arcade Fire, might be a professional somebody: the flat-brimmed, cream-billed bolero hat atop his head or the shock of slicked-back, bleached blond hair that materializes when he takes it off. He’s also exceptionally tall, a trait that helped him to win MVP at the 2016 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game over Jason Sudeikis and Nick Cannon.

On a warm day in March, Butler and his wife, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne, were walking through Times Square when Butler was conscripted into a tourist-trap performance where someone would vault over a group of men. It was safe to say that Butler was the only participant who’d once accepted a Grammy for album of the year.

In the end, the performers chose to leap over someone else. “Discrimination against tall people is real,” he noted with humor returning to Chassagne, who’d pressed a wad of bills into a collection hat.

This trip represented a musical homecoming, of sorts. The night before, Butler, Chassagne and Arcade Fire, a band that has headlined to more than 100,000 at Glastonbury, performed at Manhattan’s 600-capacity Bowery Ballroom for the first time since 2004. David Bowie and David Byrne attended that performance 18 years ago, and the joint patronage of two art-rock legends helped anoint the band as The Next Big Thing.

“Right out of the gate, it was like, ‘I think our lives might be a bit different,’” Butler recalled.

What followed was one of the sharpest ascents in recent rock history. Arcade Fire’s debut, “Funeral,” became the fastest-selling record in the history of its indie label, Merge. Its 2010 LP, “The Suburbs,”debuted at No. 1 and was the surprise album of the year winner, beating out Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Eminem.

The group’s music has combined delicate interiority with expansive Springsteen-esque rock ’n’ roll, and pulled from classical, disco, chamber music and Haitian rara. Onstage, where the large ensemble’s ecstatic performances could resemble a tent revival, it has sounded like a shuffling street band, a tight rhythm machine and a superstar rock unit capable of filling out a football stadium.

But when “Everything Now” arrived in 2017, an LP that hybridized the band’s dance and rock sounds, something shifted. The record was accompanied by a trollish press campaign where the band created several websites that intentionally spread false information about its activity, as a sort of commentary on the nascent “fake news” era. This did not go over well. For whatever reason — the darker political climate, the quality of the record itself — “Everything Now” was a commercial and critical misfire.

“We,” the group’s sixth album, due May 6, is a reset. The lead single “The Lightning I & II” returns to soaring, big-sky rock, and the existential concerns threaded through the band’s career. (“I heard the thunder and I thought it was the answer,” Butler sings. “But I find I got the question wrong.”) “Age of Anxiety I” and “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” start as solemn, piano-driven ballads before slowly building toward explosive, rhythmic release. Other songs veer into stripped-down, singer-songwriter territory: “End of Empire I-IV” is a multipart epic about life during American decline, while “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” wouldn’t sound out of place at a campfire singalong.

“I look at Paul Simon, and look at the breadth between ‘Graceland’ and what he was doing with Simon & Garfunkel — to think that’s the same person who made that music, that’s extremely inspiring,” Butler said. “I was always more interested in seeing if there’s a way to do whatever you want, musically, and still have it feel like the band.”

As the group performed some of those tracks at the Bowery — and led elated fans on a mini-march into a nearby subway station — the new songs bled seamlessly together with older favorites like “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Ready to Start.” But the band that made “We” has undergone significant changes.

“It’s a less physically unified life than it was once upon a time, which you can look at however you want to,” Richard Reed Parry, one of the band’s multi-instrumentalists, said in a video interview, with a knowing chuckle. “Very, very different life these days.”

SITTING AT THE Midtown restaurant Patsy’s, where Butler’s grandfather Alvino Rey used to perform with his jazz band, Butler was chattier than Chassagne, but they regularly finished each other’s thoughts, and shared knowing glances across the table.

“I’ve come to believe that music is literally a spirit,” Butler said. “Not figuratively. There’s something that gets inside you, and it can get passed on to different people.”

For more than 20 years, Arcade Fire has thought deeply about the forces, spiritual and otherwise, that connect people. On some level, its music wagers, all of us feel that society is stupefying, and modernity is terrifying. Only by acknowledging this can we be liberated from the paralysis that accompanies adulthood, and recapture our uncontaminated appreciation of the world.

“The music is good, but I think it’s also about what they represent,” David Byrne said in a video interview. “They don’t seem too slick; they take the slightly chaotic aspect of their shows as a virtue. I think people appreciate that they’re not getting a super-duper polished pop product — it feels like this is something they really believe in.”

In the band’s early years, the band gained and shed members, settling into a lineup that included the multi-instrumentalist Parry, the bassist Tim Kingsbury, and Butler’s brother, Will, on various keys, strings and football helmets; the drummer Jeremy Gara began as a tour manager, and joined full-time in 2004. They remained remarkably self-contained, and resistant to the external pressures of rapid success.

“When things blow up, the sharks come around,” Chassagne said with a laugh. “We know what we want to do, and so you don’t get impressed by checks and promises.” (Butler noted they “probably met about 20 people” who claimed to have signed Nirvana after “Funeral” blew up.)

After the 2013 album “Reflektor,” Butler and Chassagne relocated to New Orleans, where they’d fallen in love with the local culture (as well as its relative proximity to Haiti, where Chassagne’s family originates), while the rest of the band remained in Montreal. The backlash to its follow-up, “Everything Now,” didn’t prompt “massive internal change,” Parry said, but noted, “It was the first time we’d been outside of an arm’s length from each other, and that had much more of an impact on the band.”

Kingsbury agreed. “It coincided with the time in everyone’s life when we were in our mid-30s, and children were appearing,” he said in a video interview. (Butler, now 42, and Chassagne, 45, have a 9-year-old son.) As a result, he said, on the band’s most recent albums “there’s certain aspects that are less all of us and a little more of them.”

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, border restrictions prevented the group from meeting in person, and working over Zoom proved fruitless. Butler said he and Chassagne challenged themselves to envision every song on “We” without production or drums, in case they were forced to make the album without the rest of the band. (Early on, Josh Tillman, who performs as Father John Misty, flew in from Los Angeles to act as a sounding board.) The band was subsequently able to convene in El Paso, Texas, in the fall of 2020, and again the following summer in Maine.

Butler and Chassagne are constantly working on new music. “Our process is just our life,” he said, noting that Chassagne doesn’t receive enough credit for the band’s output. “Régine has this magical ability to remember almost anything we’ve ever done. It’s always coexisting at the same time; some songs take 20 years to write, some songs take 20 minutes.” During our conversation, Butler spoke often about time, musing about what it takes for a restaurant to stay open for 100 years (“There’s something to be said for just executing something”), and lamenting the strict standards that new artists are judged by (“I hope there’s still a space in the world for a band to make a bunch of crappy records, and have their fifth record be genius”).

“The common path of almost every artist that I respect is very circuitous — it’s not a straight line, and there’s a lot of ups and downs,” he said in a separate video interview. “It takes 20 years to know if anything’s good or bad, anyway.”

Butler also resisted the idea that the reaction to “Everything Now” provoked any extended contemplation about the band’s identity. Still, “We” feels like a subtle recalibration that both revisits the past, and pushes forward. The band is “always mixing the old with the new,” Parry said. “Things kind of surface and resurface.” Parts of “The Lightning I and II” date back to the “Funeral” era. Chassagne said one movement of “End of Empire I-IV” was written when she and Butler first met in college; it’s immediately followed by something they wrote the week of recording. Parry said a lot of music was left on the cutting-room floor. “There were other records we were working on at the same time as this one that I would like to exist,” he noted.

For “We,” Arcade Fire brought in the British producer Nigel Godrich, who’s known most for his work with Radiohead. The title harkens back to Butler’s childhood memory of his grandmother reading him a book with “We” stamped on the cover. That book was Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography, but the name is more directly drawn from the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel of the same name, which takes place in a future society that exists entirely under mass surveillance.

Butler said he made a physical mood board of inspirational material, and was drawn to both “dystopic images of a boot stepping on someone’s face, everyone in masks, really kind of anxiety, fever dream stuff” and “images of our son, family, old pictures of the band, and the piece of concrete outside of our old apartment in Montreal where we wrote our names in 2003.” (It’s still there, he proudly noted.)

“It took a while to understand why they were related to each other,” he said. “But we started to realize that it was more like the light and the shadow. It’s tempting to separate them, but they’re actually sort of the same thing.”

The first half of the record is shot through with dread about the modern age, with Butler lamenting the palliatives — television, medication, algorithmic-generated content — that don’t seem to make us any happier. But it gives way to a more tender perspective, with Butler and Chassagne singing directly about their son, Eddie (who’s credited with providing “whispers” on “End of Empire”), and the way that love forges meaningful kinship. Peter Gabriel sings on “Unconditional II (Race and Religion),” and they said it was gratifying to talk shop with another artist with the same dogged approach to pursuing music.

“It was so special to hear that because I was like …” Chassagne said, trailing off.

“ … we feel crazy sometimes,” Butler said, finishing the thought. “It’s nice to meet other people that know what we’re talking about.”

“We” signals a new era for Arcade Fire in some more formal ways. The day after the first of what turned into four Bowery shows, Will Butler announced he was leaving the band. “There was no acute reason beyond that I’ve changed — and the band has changed — over the last almost 20 years,” he said in a statement.

Kingsbury said, “He was just ready to take a break.” Parry added he was “devastated” by the move: “I think there’s just a lot of things that he has to do, while he’s still in the prime of his life, that are not being in a rock band on tour.” (Will Butler declined to comment.)

Arcade Fire’s membership has always expanded in a live setting, and with a tour tentatively scheduled for the fall, it has brought in Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner and the Haitian multi-instrumentalist Paul Beaubrun. “Even though they’re one of the biggest bands in the world, it always feels like we’re the underdog,” Beaubrun said. “We have to give it our all, all of the time. I’ve never felt that from anyone.”

The group’s ambitions still stretch beyond putting out more records. Chassagne cited her philanthropic work in Haiti as a major focal point of the next few years. Butler said he and Beaubrun are working on launching a digital label focused on importing Haitian artists. He brought up his grandfather Alvino, who continued playing music into his 90s. “The scope of his career, and those relationships, is so long. Even with my brother — if he hadn’t been in the band, we just have so many shared experiences that I’m really proud of.”

He wanted to stay present, he said, no matter what the future held. “This whole process of people judging a record, and is this good or is this bad — I don’t give a [expletive] about any of that,” he said. “I play music to stay alive.”