‘Everything Now’ on the table for Arcade Fire
Band’s fifth album gets guerrilla marketing
Win Butler doesn’t want to talk about Terry Gilliam.
“I really don’t,” the Arcade Fire frontman says when asked about the bizarre story floating around the Internet, claiming the band was millions of dollars deep in a filmmaking project with the director.
Butler’s answer, polite but curt, didn’t seem odd at the time — celebrities often decline to discuss their financials with interviewers. But that’s not why Butler didn’t want to talk about the story.
Turns out, the Gilliam scandal was, plainly put, fake news. The story appeared on one of several hoax websites hawking sensational headlines about Arcade Fire. The band created parody sites as part of its promotional campaign, with slightly-misspelled mastheads that redirected users to an Arcade Fire homepage. Thanks for that, Win. The fake news sites and parody social media posts Arcade Fire is using to promote their fifth album, Everything Now (out Friday), continue a long tradition of messing with fans to tease new music, from staging a hotline for 2007’s Neon Bible to scrawling
Reflektor hieroglyphics on buildings around the world in 2013.
Generally, their guerrilla marketing tactics have coincided with successful albums. The Suburbs won the album of the year Grammy in 2010 and reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200, with Reflektor also debuting at the top of the charts. Earlier this month, the band earned their first No. 1 song on a Billboard chart with Every
thing Now’s title track. But where the band channeled nostalgia for its teenage past on
The Suburbs and mused about the repercussions of war on Neon Bible, their lead-up antics to Every
thing Now set the stage for an album that explores the carnivalesque reality of modern politics and popular culture.
“I think some of the universe of the record is this claustrophobic Wild West that is contemporary culture now,” Butler says.
Everything Now reckons with a younger generation losing its grip on reality on songs like Signs of
Life, Creature Comfort and Peter Pan. And in case listeners missed the point, the band drives it home with two tracks, both named Infi
nite Content, consisting solely of the lyrics “Infinite content / We’re infinitely content.”
“I think ‘album cycle’ and ‘content’ are maybe my two least favorite concepts,” he says. “So we’ve almost tried to take the aesthetic of what’s horrible about content and album cycles and tried to make art out of it. That’s kind of the dregs of what we’re left with as artists.”
Butler also balks at the suggestion that Everything Now was any less emotionally open than Arcade Fire’s previous releases. “Less forthcoming with emotion?” he says. “I mean, We Don’t
Deserve Love is pretty emotional, it’s a tear-jerker to me.”
For all of Everything Now’s digital-age cynicism, Butler doesn’t see the album as a departure for the band, full of the same sweeping sincerity that’s characterized their music from the start.
“Put Your Money On Me, to me, is one of the best songs we’ve ever written, I’m so proud of how it turned out,” he says. “We Don’t
Deserve Love and Put Your Money On Me, they’re a lot of the heart of the album. Good God Damn is one of the most pure, strippedback things we’ve ever done. ... That’s the stuff that’s hardest to accomplish with a really big band, the really subtle, nuanced stuff.
“In a way,” he concludes, “it’s more difficult to do things that are simple.”
“We’ve almost tried to take the aesthetic of what’s horrible about content and album cycles and tried to make art out of it.”