The story of Arcade Fire

Texas, Maine and Montreal

Arcade Fire's story starts with a very tall kid named Edwin Farnham Butler the Third, known as Win, born on the fourteenth of April 1980 in Truckee, California. His father was a geologist, and when the work moved from gold to oil, the family settled in The Woodlands, a planned suburb outside Houston, Texas. Music ran deep on his mother's side. Liza Rey was a jazz harpist, and her father was Alvino Rey, a big band leader and steel guitar pioneer. Win later said being a musician in his family was about as normal as being an accountant. At fifteen he went off to boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he played center on the basketball team and met a classmate called Josh Deu.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After a year at Sarah Lawrence College, Win moved to Montreal in 2000 to study at McGill University, where he would earn a degree in religious studies. It was in Montreal that he met Régine Chassagne. She was born there on the nineteenth of August 1976 to Haitian parents who had fled the dictatorship of François Duvalier, and she grew up in the suburb of Saint-Lambert. Régine had taught herself music as a child, studied medieval and baroque music, and sang jazz. Win saw her sing at an art event and asked her to play with him. She says she thought he was just hitting on her, and that he had to call five times before she agreed. They wrote a song together that very first night.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Win and Josh Deu founded Arcade Fire in Montreal around 2001, and Régine joined almost at once. The early band was a loose crowd of friends from the Mile End neighbourhood, including Brendan Reed, who lived with Win and Régine and helped write and arrange songs, plus bassist Myles Broscoe and guitarist and drummer Dane Mills. In the summer of 2002 they drove down to the Butler family's place on Mount Desert Island in Maine to record an EP. A Concordia student called Richard Reed Parry came along to help with the recording, and he never really left. Broscoe quit after tensions with Win, and Josh Deu went back to his studies, though he kept working on the band's visuals.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the winter of 2003 the band threw a launch show for the EP at the Casa del Popolo in Montreal. The room was packed past capacity, and the night ended in the middle of the encore with an argument between Win and Brendan Reed, who quit on stage. Dane Mills told friends in the crowd that he considered the band finished. It was not. Win's younger brother Will, and a bassist called Tim Kingsbury, who had played with Parry in a band called the New International Standards, stepped in. Kingsbury remembers first seeing Arcade Fire in a Montreal loft, with Win towering over thirty people sitting on the floor, and Win later walking up after one of his shows to tell him to cut a verse.[1] [2] [3]

Win and Régine married in the summer of 2003, at a maple farm near Montreal. That same summer the producer and engineer Howard Bilerman took over the drums, and the reshaped band began playing out and recording what would become their first album. Their live shows were already something special, with members swapping instruments and marching through the crowd, and before the end of their first year together in this form they had a deal with Merge Records, the North Carolina indie label. Win said he picked Merge because he loved its bands, like the Magnetic Fields and Neutral Milk Hotel, and he denied there had ever been a bidding war.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Funeral

Most of Funeral was recorded in about a week in August 2003 at the Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal, with more work done in Win and Régine's apartment. It cost roughly ten thousand dollars. The title came from real grief. While the album was being made, Régine's grandmother died in June 2003, the Butler brothers' grandfather Alvino Rey died in February 2004 at the age of ninety five, and Richard Reed Parry lost aunts in April 2004. The songs are full of childhood, loss and snow. The first half, the Neighborhood suite, imagines a town in a winter power cut, drawn from the great North American ice storm of 1998, which left much of Quebec in the dark.[1] [2]

Funeral came out on Merge on the fourteenth of September 2004. Pitchfork gave it nine point seven out of ten and named it the best album of the year, and that review is widely credited with lighting the fuse. The album became the first Merge release ever to enter the Billboard 200 and the fastest seller in the label's history. By the spring of 2005 commercial rock stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco were playing Neighborhood Number Three, Power Out, which Win found almost unbelievable for a small indie record. At one New York showcase that autumn, he introduced the band with a grin as Flavor Of The Month. By November 2005 Funeral had sold more than half a million copies worldwide.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The famous names arrived quickly. David Bowie loved Funeral so much he bought it in bulk to hand out to friends. On the ninth of September 2005 he joined the band on the Fashion Rocks television special to sing Wake Up, and he turned up again at their show in Central Park. U2 started playing Wake Up over the speakers right before they walked on stage every night of the Vertigo Tour, and Arcade Fire opened three of those shows. At the Montreal date they joined U2 during the encore for Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart. Rebellion Lies reached number nineteen in the UK, still their highest single there, and the band played Top of the Pops.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A small detail tells you how homemade Funeral was. On the opening track, Neighborhood Number One, Tunnels, the guitar was accidentally recorded through a microphone meant for vocals on the other side of the room, and they kept the take. The first single, a seven inch of that song pressed in fifteen hundred copies, had a 1940 radio recording of Alvino Rey's orchestra on the B side. The Funeral tour began in small clubs and kept outgrowing its venues, running through North America, Europe and Japan into 2005. In April 2006 the band won the Juno Award for Songwriters of the Year, and Funeral was nominated for a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.[1] [2] [3]

A church, a neon Bible and a smashed guitar

With Funeral money, the band bought a small former church in the Quebec village of Farnham, about seventy kilometres southeast of Montreal. It had also been a Masonic temple and was working as a café when they bought it. They turned it into a studio and recorded most of their second album there, adding sessions in Budapest with a film orchestra and a military men's choir. Jeremy Gara, an Ottawa drummer who had played with Kingsbury and Parry in the New International Standards, now sat behind the kit, and violinist Sarah Neufeld of Bell Orchestre became a core member. The album was called Neon Bible, and its cover showed a neon sign caught mid flicker.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Win, an American who had lived in Canada for years, said he wrote Neon Bible feeling like he was watching his homeland from outside. He watched TV preachers and get rich quick schemes, and the record is full of television, the ocean and dread. One song was first titled after Joe Simpson, the father and manager of Jessica and Ashlee Simpson, before Win dropped the name. The album leaked online in January 2007, came out in early March, and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with ninety two thousand copies sold in its first week. It topped the charts in Canada and Ireland, and Q magazine later named it album of the year.[1]

On the twenty fourth of February 2007 Arcade Fire made their first appearance on Saturday Night Live. During the performance a string on Win's acoustic guitar broke. He ripped off the rest of the strings and smashed the guitar on the stage floor until it shattered. On its front, in duct tape, was a Haitian Creole proverb meaning that an empty sack cannot stand up. Kanpe, the Creole word for standing up, later became the name of the Haitian charity Régine co-founded. The band's first charity single, Intervention, had been released in December 2006 with proceeds to Partners In Health, although the band accidentally uploaded the wrong song, Black Wave, Bad Vibrations, which spread around the internet.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Neon Bible tour ran for a year, with one hundred and twenty two shows in nineteen countries. The band promised Partners In Health one dollar, one pound or one euro from every ticket, a policy they would keep for years. On the fourteenth of October 2007 Win and Régine joined Bruce Springsteen on stage in Ottawa, where Springsteen played their song Keep the Car Running. Across the Atlantic, the Foo Fighters covered it too, and Dave Grohl said he listened to it every morning. In March 2008 the band played free concerts in Ohio for Barack Obama before the primary, and in January 2009 they played the Obama campaign staff ball with Jay Z.[1] [2] [3]

Not everyone was a fan. In 2009 Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips told Rolling Stone that Arcade Fire were pompous and treated their crew and audience badly. Win answered with polite bafflement, saying the two bands had shared a bill only once and had barely said hello. Meanwhile the Neon Bible tour produced a concert film called Miroir Noir, directed by Vincent Morisset, and Win and Régine worked with Owen Pallett on music for Richard Kelly's film The Box. A new recording of Wake Up was used in the trailer for Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, the first of several projects with the director.[1] [2] [3]

The Suburbs and the Grammy

For their third album, Win looked back at where he and Will grew up, the sprawl of The Woodlands in Texas. He described The Suburbs as neither a love letter to the suburbs nor an attack on them, but a letter from them. He said he wanted it to sound like a mix of Depeche Mode and Neil Young. It was produced by Markus Dravs and recorded mostly at Win and Régine's home in Montreal, with every finished song pressed onto a twelve inch lacquer and then recorded back for the digital master. It came with eight different covers. Released in early August 2010, it went straight to number one in the United States, the UK, Canada and Ireland.[1] [2] [3]

The Suburbs era was full of new ideas about how music could be seen. On the fifth of August 2010 the band's Madison Square Garden concert was streamed live on YouTube, directed by Terry Gilliam, and Merge estimated one point eight million people watched. The director Chris Milk made an interactive video for We Used to Wait with Google, which asked for the address where you grew up and then used Street View to show your own childhood street. Spike Jonze filmed a thirty minute short called Scenes from the Suburbs. And Régine's disco flavoured Sprawl Two, inspired by Tracy Kidder's book about the doctor Paul Farmer, got an interactive video you could control by dancing at your webcam.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirteenth of February 2011, The Suburbs won the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating records by Eminem, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Lady Antebellum. It was the first time an indie act had taken the prize. Barbra Streisand, presenting, seemed to think The Suburbs was the name of the band, and Win stepped up to the microphone looking as stunned as everyone else. Then the band went straight back on stage to play Ready to Start. Two weeks later the album jumped from number fifty two to number twelve on the Billboard chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The awards kept coming. The Suburbs won Best International Album at the Brit Awards, where the band also won Best International Group, and it swept the Junos. In September 2011 it won the Polaris Music Prize, worth thirty thousand dollars. Accepting the oversized cheque, Richard Reed Parry joked that the band had always wanted to be paid with a giant novelty cheque, and he admitted backstage that all the prizes made them feel profoundly awkward. They said the money would go to their Montreal studio. In 2012 they wrote Abraham's Daughter for The Hunger Games, plus ceremonial music for the film's fictional Capitol, and backed Mick Jagger on Saturday Night Live.[1] [2] [3]

One cause ran through all of this. When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, Régine said she was literally packing her suitcase to go there. That February the band licensed Wake Up for commercials during the Super Bowl, with every cent going to Partners In Health for earthquake relief. By the end of 2010 their ticket donations to the charity had passed eight hundred thousand dollars. Régine also helped launch Kanpe to coordinate longer term aid. Her own family history was part of it. Her great uncle, a doctor and diplomat, had been involved in a failed attempt to overthrow Duvalier, and many of her relatives were rounded up and killed.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Reflektor, Haiti and Her

The next album grew out of Win's first trip to Haiti with Régine, which he called the beginning of a major change in how he saw the world. They fell for rara, the street music of Haitian carnival. Recording began in Louisiana in 2011 with Haitian percussionists, then moved to Jamaica in 2012, where the band rented an empty castle called Trident, built by an eccentric local man who had run out of money. In August 2012 they started working with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, alongside Markus Dravs. Win said the goal was a record Régine could dance to. They wrote fifty or sixty songs and ended up with a double album.[1] [2] [3]

Reflektor's launch was a puzzle. In August 2013 a strange symbol based on Haitian vodou veve drawings appeared on walls in cities around the world, then a mural in Manhattan revealed the date nine p.m. on nine nine. On the ninth of September the band played a secret show in Montreal as The Reflektors, at nine p.m., for nine dollars. The campaign drew criticism when Slate reported property damage, and the band apologised, saying the stencils were meant to be in washable chalk. The title track was credited to the fictional Reflektors and featured David Bowie on backing vocals. Parry said Bowie liked the song so much he joked he might steal it.[1] [2] [3]

Released on the twenty eighth of October 2013, Reflektor went to number one in the US with one hundred and forty thousand copies in its first week, and topped the charts in Canada and the UK. According to their manager Scott Rodger it cost one point six million dollars to make, against about five hundred thousand for The Suburbs. The band launched it with the season premiere of Saturday Night Live and an NBC special with cameos from Bono, Ben Stiller and Michael Cera. On the twenty seventh of June 2014 they headlined Glastonbury. Earlier that year Win and Régine had become parents, when their son was born in April 2013.[1] [2] [3]

At the same time, the band scored Spike Jonze's film Her with Owen Pallett. The song Supersymmetry, written for the film, ended up on Reflektor. In January 2014 Will Butler and Pallett were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score. The score itself was not officially released until 2021. The old church in Farnham had a collapsed roof, so in January 2013 the band put it up for sale, tweeting to ask if anybody wanted to buy a church. The asking price was three hundred and twenty five thousand Canadian dollars. A documentary, The Reflektor Tapes, directed by Kahlil Joseph, followed in 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By now Arcade Fire moved among rock royalty. In October 2013 they played Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit, where Young joined them with his harmonica on a new song Win said came to him in a dream and sounded exactly like a Neil Young song. Springsteen's advice to them, Win said, was to play Italy. The band were living modestly, all within ten minutes of each other in Montreal, and Parry still drove a 1989 Toyota Camry hatchback so his bass would fit. He also worried aloud that the band's image was becoming all Win and Régine all the time, the royal couple narrative he said he was always guarding against.[1]

Everything Now

On the nineteenth of January 2017, timed to Donald Trump's inauguration, the band released I Give You Power with Mavis Staples, giving the proceeds to the American Civil Liberties Union. That May they signed a two album deal with Columbia Records. The fifth album, Everything Now, was co-produced by Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk and Steve Mackey of Pulp. Its title song had a surprising origin. At the Voodoo festival in New Orleans in 2016, before playing Neighborhood Number One, the band recorded the crowd singing a melody from the unreleased song, and that crowd ended up on the record. The single became their first number one on any Billboard chart, topping the Adult Alternative airplay list.[1] [2] [3]

The Everything Now rollout was a satire of corporate branding. The band invented a fictional company, Everything Now Corp, and put out fake news stories, a fake early review of their own album, and a fake Arcade Fire edition of the Rock Band video game. The album booklet looked like a supermarket flyer, with song lengths printed like prices. In Dublin they hid boxes of a pretend breakfast cereal called Creature Comfort, and fans who found one got into an afterparty. The cover, by the French artist JR, showed a billboard of a mountain range standing in front of those very mountains in Death Valley, California.[1] [2]

Released on the twenty eighth of July 2017, Everything Now debuted at number one in the US, Canada and the UK, their third straight US number one. But for the first time the critics were split. Its Metacritic score was sixty six, and some reviews called it a serious misstep, while NME gave it five stars. In October 2017, the band parted ways with Scott Rodger, who had managed them for thirteen years. Rodger had once said their business goal was to sell a million records but get paid like they sold four million, because they owned their own masters and copyrights. The Infinite Content tour carried on into 2018, in arenas and then smaller venues.[1] [2] [3]

Life outside the band made news too. Win became a regular at the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game and was named its Most Valuable Player in 2016. Under the name DJ Windows 98 he played DJ sets, once bringing out Madonna and Diplo in Montreal. On the ninth of July 2019, the Texan who had lived in Montreal for nearly two decades became a Canadian citizen in a ceremony in the city. That same year the band recorded Baby Mine for Tim Burton's Dumbo. Will Butler, meanwhile, was releasing his own solo records on Merge, and he later studied for a master's degree at the Harvard Kennedy School.[1] [2] [3] [4]

WE, a departure and the allegations

The band had been writing for a year when the COVID pandemic hit, and Win said he kept going through lockdown and wrote two or three albums' worth of songs. In April 2021 they released a forty five minute instrumental called Memories of the Age of Anxiety on the meditation app Headspace. The sixth album was recorded with Radiohead's producer Nigel Godrich, partly outside El Paso, Texas, where Godrich said they basically lived in a cult for a couple of months, with nobody coming in or out. They also worked in New Orleans and on Mount Desert Island. The album was named WE, after Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 dystopian novel, and Peter Gabriel sang backing vocals on one track.[1] [2]

In March 2022, just as the band announced WE, Will Butler revealed he had left at the end of 2021, after the album was finished. He said there was no acute reason, only that he had changed and the band had changed over almost twenty years. He was still, he said, their friend and family. Win told NME his brother had three young children and many interests beyond the band. Will went on to write the songs for the play Stereophonic, which won the Tony for Best Play in 2024 and earned him two nominations of his own. WE came out on the sixth of May 2022, reaching number one in the UK and number six in the US.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty seventh of August 2022, just before the WE world tour began, Pitchfork published an investigation in which four people accused Win Butler of sexual misconduct. Three women, all devoted fans aged between eighteen and twenty three when their contact began, described sexual relationships between 2016 and 2020, including unwanted explicit messages, that they came to see as exploitative given the age and power gap. A fourth person, who is gender fluid, alleged that Butler sexually assaulted them twice in 2015, once in a car and once at their apartment. Butler acknowledged the sexual interactions, but insisted all of them were consensual and denied any assault.[1] [2]

In his statements, Win Butler apologised to anyone he had hurt, while calling any suggestion of non consensual behaviour wrong. He said he had struggled with mental health and what he called the ghosts of childhood abuse, and that he started drinking during the heaviest depression of his life after the couple suffered a miscarriage. Régine said she was certain he had never touched a woman without consent, and that he had lost his way and found his way back. The singer Feist, opening the European tour, played the first two nights in Dublin, donated her proceeds to Women's Aid, then went home. The allegations did not lead to any police action.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fallout continued. In October 2022 Beck quietly dropped out as the opening act on the North American leg, and the Haitian band Boukman Eksperyans took his place. Some American radio stations pulled Arcade Fire from their playlists. Later that year a fifth person came forward to Pitchfork, describing a three year relationship that began in 2015 when she was twenty two, which she called emotionally abusive and manipulative. When the Junos nominated the band for Group of the Year in 2023, the Canadian academy defended the choice as honouring the whole band. The tours went on, and WE was nominated for a Grammy. In November 2023 they played Neon Bible in full in New York.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pink Elephant and a separation

In March 2025 a stripped down Arcade Fire turned up as surprise guests at Willie Nelson's Luck Reunion outside Austin. Dressed as jesters, Win, Régine, Tim Kingsbury and Paul Beaubrun played to about a hundred people in a saloon, debuting new songs and covering Deep in the Heart of Texas, a hit for Win's grandfather Alvino Rey. The seventh album, Pink Elephant, was produced with Daniel Lanois, famous for his work with U2 and Bob Dylan, and recorded at Win and Régine's Good News studio in New Orleans. On the first single, Year of the Snake, Régine played bass for the first time on an Arcade Fire record, and Win played drums.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Pink Elephant came out on the ninth of May 2025, the band's first album since the allegations, and many reviewers read it that way. Pitchfork called it a vow of penance, while the Daily Telegraph found it almost too personal but still powerful. Its Metacritic score was fifty five. Commercially it was a shock. It failed to enter the Billboard 200 at all, the first proper Arcade Fire album to miss it, selling about six thousand two hundred copies in its first week. A short promotional tour ran from Mexico City to London's Royal Albert Hall, without Richard Reed Parry, who stayed home on paternity leave for the birth of his first child.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirtieth of October 2025, the band announced on Instagram that Win and Régine had decided to separate after more than twenty years of marriage. The statement said they still loved, admired and supported each other as they co parented their son, that their work in Haiti through Kanpe would continue, and that their bond as creative soulmates would endure, as would Arcade Fire. The news was reported by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Billboard. The two had been the heart of the band since the very beginning, writing the songs together and sharing the stage for more than two decades.[1] [2] [3]

The band kept working. For Record Store Day on the eighteenth of April 2026 they released Open Your Heart or Die Trying, an ambient reimagining of Pink Elephant that they described as a score to a film that has not been made yet. It reached streaming services on the first of May. In March 2026, Win joined the Killers on stage at a festival in Bogota to sing Rebellion Lies, after Brandon Flowers told the crowd that Arcade Fire had always made his band want to be better. As of 2026, the core line up is Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury and Jeremy Gara.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Whatever happens next, Funeral's legacy is secure. Pitchfork ranked it the second best album of the 2000s, behind only Radiohead's Kid A, and it has appeared on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest albums of all time. Critics credit it with turning indie rock from a fringe movement into a path to arenas, and with spreading the big wordless group chorus that filled festival stages for a decade after Wake Up. Coldplay's Chris Martin once called them the greatest band in the history of music. Rebellion Lies remains their most performed live song, and Wake Up still plays in football stadiums, including before Burnley and Aston Villa matches in England.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Arcade Fire

Win Butler and Régine Chassagne. They met in Montreal around 2000 or 2001, wrote a song together the night she agreed to play with him, and married at a maple farm in 2003. For more than two decades they wrote Arcade Fire's songs together and led the band as a pair. Régine publicly stood by Win when he was accused of misconduct in 2022. In October 2025 they announced their separation, promising to co parent their son and to keep making music together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Win Butler and Will Butler. The brothers grew up together in The Woodlands, Texas, both went to Phillips Exeter, and Will joined his older brother's band after its first line up fell apart. On stage Will was the whirlwind, throwing drums in the air. He left at the end of 2021, saying he and the band had changed. Win said the family was fully supportive, and Will has called leaving a wonderful decision that led him to Broadway.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Arcade Fire and David Bowie. Bowie was one of the band's earliest famous champions, buying copies of Funeral to give to friends. In September 2005 he sang Wake Up with them on the Fashion Rocks broadcast and joined them in Central Park, and they recorded Life on Mars and Five Years together. Eight years later he stopped by the studio in New York, loved Reflektor, and added a backing vocal to the title track.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Arcade Fire and U2. U2 used Wake Up as the walk on music for every show of the Vertigo Tour, and Arcade Fire opened three of those shows, joining U2 for Love Will Tear Us Apart in Montreal. Bono became a friend and appeared in their Reflektor television special. Critics often compare the two bands' ambitions, and Pink Elephant was produced by Daniel Lanois, the co producer of U2's classic albums.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Arcade Fire and Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen was a key influence on Neon Bible. In October 2007 Win and Régine joined him on stage in Ottawa, where he played their Keep the Car Running with the E Street Band. He became something of a mentor, and Win recalled that one piece of advice Springsteen gave the band was simply to play Italy.[1] [2] [3]

Arcade Fire and James Murphy. The band had wanted to work with the LCD Soundsystem leader since the Neon Bible days, but schedules never matched until 2012. Murphy co produced Reflektor with Markus Dravs and worked most on Awful Sound, Oh Eurydice, though he insisted he did not do much. At LCD's farewell show in 2011, Win shouted shut up and play the hits, which became the title of the concert documentary.[1] [2] [3]

Arcade Fire and Markus Dravs. The British producer worked on Neon Bible, produced The Suburbs and co produced Reflektor, winning the Album of the Year Grammy with the band in 2011. Win recommended him to Chris Martin, telling him Dravs would kick Coldplay into shape, and Dravs went on to make Viva la Vida and Mumford and Sons' Babel.[1] [2] [3]

Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett. The Toronto violinist and composer co wrote the string arrangements for Funeral and Neon Bible and toured with the band. Pallett even wrote a song called This Is the Dream of Win and Regine. With Will Butler, Pallett was nominated for an Academy Award for the score to Her, which Arcade Fire wrote for Spike Jonze.[1] [2] [3]

Arcade Fire and Feist. Leslie Feist, a fellow Canadian star, was booked to open the European leg of the WE tour in 2022. The misconduct allegations against Win Butler broke just as she arrived. She played two nights in Dublin, gave her proceeds to Women's Aid, then withdrew, saying that staying would look like defending or ignoring harm, while leaving would make her judge and jury. The band said they understood and respected her decision.[1] [2] [3]

Arcade Fire and Scott Rodger. The manager, who also worked with Paul McCartney, came on board a few months after Funeral and negotiated deals that let the band keep their publishing and masters. He defended them publicly after the 2011 Grammy controversy and boasted that they sold a million records but got paid like four million. They parted ways in October 2017 after thirteen years.[1] [2]

Richard Reed Parry and The National. Parry became close friends with Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the National on the festival circuit. He arranged vocals and played bass and guitar on their 2010 album High Violet, often joined them on stage, and wrote classical pieces with Bryce. The National also opened for Arcade Fire on the Neon Bible tour.[1] [2]

Arcade Fire and The Killers. The two bands rose in the same years and share a love of Springsteen. The Killers have covered The Suburbs, and in March 2026 Win Butler joined them in Bogota for Rebellion Lies and When You Were Young. Brandon Flowers told the crowd that Arcade Fire both frustrated him and made him want to be better.[1]

Rare facts about Arcade Fire

• Arcade Fire's Win Butler was educated in religious studies, graduating from McGill University in 2004. Win moved to Montreal in 2000 to study at McGill. He told the Guardian the degree was mostly scriptural interpretation, reading the Bible in different translations, though he joked that he could not cut it in Aramaic.[1] [2]
• The first Arcade Fire single had a 1940 recording by the Butlers' grandfather Alvino Rey on the B side. The seven inch of Neighborhood Number One, Tunnels, pressed in fifteen hundred copies in June 2004, featured a live radio broadcast of My Buddy by the Alvino Rey Orchestra.[1] [2]
• The guitar on Funeral's opening track was recorded by mistake through a vocal microphone across the room. Win Butler said the guitar part of Neighborhood Number One, Tunnels, was captured by a microphone meant for vocals rather than the guitar mic. They kept the take on the finished album.[1]
• Funeral cost roughly ten thousand dollars to make. Recorded mostly in a week at the Hotel2Tango studio in August 2003 and partly in Win and Régine's apartment, the album's production cost was estimated at around ten thousand dollars.[1]
• The Funeral cover art was painted on pieces of a wooden planter that had to be sawn down to fit a scanner. Artist Tracy Maurice painted the hand and quill on wood, rode her bike to the band's place with it wrapped in a towel, and then they had to saw the pieces smaller to scan them for Merge.[1] [2]
• Wolf Parade's drummer Arlen Thompson played drums on Wake Up. Although Howard Bilerman was Funeral's main drummer and engineer, the credits for Wake Up list Arlen Thompson of fellow Montreal band Wolf Parade on drums.[1] [2]
• Tim Kingsbury once paid the rent working as a telemarketer for a pharmaceutical company. After moving to Montreal in 2001, Kingsbury struggled to find full time work in bands and took a telemarketing job while playing with groups like the New International Standards.[1]
• Tim Kingsbury named his side project after a nineteenth century daredevil who died jumping a waterfall. His project Sam Patch is named after the Jersey Jumper, who leapt from bridges and waterfalls and died in 1829 attempting a stunt at the High Falls in Rochester, New York.[1]
• The Neon Bible cover sign was built for the stage but proved too fragile to tour. Designer Tracy Maurice created a neon sign intended as a live backdrop. It was too delicate to transport, so it lived on as the album cover, shot on 16 millimetre film.[1] [2]
• Fans could hear Neon Bible's first single by phoning a toll free number. In December 2006 the band let listeners hear Black Mirror by calling a number that spelled out Neon Bible, extension seven seven seven seven, before streaming it online.[1]
• Arcade Fire refused to let Rebellion Lies close the pilot of the TV series The Black Donnellys. The song was meant for the show's closing scene, but the band would not grant the rights, and Snow Patrol's Open Your Eyes was used instead.[1]
• The band threatened legal action against Fox for using No Cars Go during the Super Bowl. Fox Sports used the song in a montage during Super Bowl forty two coverage. The band said the network never asked permission and considered suing.[1]
• Richard Reed Parry once played an Arcade Fire concert in his old high school cafeteria. In January 2007 the band played Canterbury High School in Ottawa for four hundred students and staff, who got to preview unreleased songs from Neon Bible first.[1]
• Richard Reed Parry was raised a Quaker and says it shapes how he sees the band's leadership. Parry told Rolling Stone that Win is clearly the leader, which suits him, because as a Quaker he knows consensus is slow and hard.[1] [2]
• Régine Chassagne's father fled Haiti as a teenager and was then drafted and sent to Vietnam. After escaping Duvalier's Haiti, he moved to the United States, got a green card and was promptly drafted. Her parents met at an army dance.[1]
• Win and Régine's first date was the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Rolling Stone reported that after writing a song on their first night of playing together, the pair went to see the martial arts film, and later got engaged at a New Year's Eve party.[1]
• Win Butler once knocked over his mother's concert harp as a boy, causing nearly ten thousand dollars of damage. His father recalled the accident cost nine thousand seven hundred and seventy seven dollars. Liza Rey's six foot concert harp is worth at least thirty thousand dollars.[1]
• As a teenager, Win and Will's mother sang backup on records by Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. Liza Rey grew up in the singing King Family, which had its own ABC television show, and sang backing vocals for Sinatra, Doris Day and Johnny Mathis before choosing a quieter life.[1] [2]
• The Suburbs had eight different covers. The 2010 album was released with eight alternative sleeves, a gesture the Independent said was usually reserved for rock aristocracy.[1] [2]
• On vinyl, We Used to Wait ends in an infinite loop. The song finishes on a locked groove at the end of side three of The Suburbs vinyl, so the record keeps playing until you lift the needle.[1]
• Arcade Fire's Suburbs Polaris win came with a joke about novelty cheques. Accepting the thirty thousand dollar prize in 2011, Richard Reed Parry said the band had always wanted to be paid with an oversized novelty cheque, and never had been until then.[1]
• The band wrote the ceremonial music of the fictional Capitol for The Hunger Games. Win and Régine composed Horn of Plenty as a thought experiment about what the Capitol's official music would sound like, and James Newton Howard adapted it for the score.[1]
• Reflektor was partly written in an abandoned castle in Jamaica. The band rented a castle called Trident, built by an eccentric local man who wanted to mingle with royalty but could not pay the bills. They brought in beds, a piano and gear.[1]
• Tickets to the secret Reflektors show in Montreal cost nine dollars and it started at nine p.m. On the ninth of September 2013 the band played Club Salsatheque under a fake name, matching the nine nine teaser campaign.[1] [2]
• Win Butler dreamed a song that sounded exactly like Neil Young, then played it with Neil Young. Win said A Band With My Friends came to him in a dream. At the 2013 Bridge School Benefit, Young joined them on harmonica, and Win introduced it as I Dreamed a Neil Young Song.[1]
• The band's old church studio in Farnham was listed for three hundred and twenty five thousand Canadian dollars. In January 2013 they tweeted asking if anybody wanted to buy a church. The listing noted it needed a new roof and that the whole nave was intact.[1] [2]
• A crowd at a New Orleans festival sings on the song Everything Now. At Voodoo Fest in 2016 the band recorded the audience singing a melody from the unreleased track before playing Neighborhood Number One, and used it on the single.[1]
• A fake breakfast cereal was part of the Everything Now promotion. Boxes of Creature Comfort cereal were hidden around Dublin in 2017. Fans who found them got into an afterparty at Whelan's after the band's Malahide Castle show.[1]
• Win Butler was named MVP of the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game in 2016. A lifelong basketball fanatic who played center at Phillips Exeter, Win is a frequent player in the celebrity game and took the Most Valuable Player award in 2016.[1] [2]
• Win Butler became a Canadian citizen in July 2019. Born in California and raised in Texas, he was naturalised on the ninth of July 2019 at a Montreal ceremony hosted by the immigration minister Ahmed Hussen.[1]
• Win and Régine were among the artist shareholders unveiled at the launch of Tidal. In March 2015 the pair appeared at the launch of the streaming service alongside other famous musicians and revealed they owned a stake in the company.[1] [2]
• Arcade Fire's 2003 debut EP did not reach a chart until 2018. The Us Kids Know EP finally charted fifteen years after release, reaching number thirty nine in Canada and number eighteen in Scotland.[1]
• Year of the Snake is the first Arcade Fire song with Win Butler on drums. On the 2025 single, Régine Chassagne also made her Arcade Fire debut on bass. Willie Nelson's son Micah Nelson plays guitar on the track.[1] [2] [3]
• At Luck Reunion in 2025, the band covered their grandfather's wartime hit. Playing dressed as jesters to around a hundred people, the stripped down band played Alvino Rey's 1942 hit Deep in the Heart of Texas.[1] [2]
• Pink Elephant was the first Arcade Fire album to miss the Billboard 200. Before it, their lowest charting album was Funeral, which peaked at number one hundred and twenty three. Pink Elephant sold about six thousand two hundred copies in its first week.[1]
• Will Butler was nominated for two Tony Awards for the play Stereophonic. After leaving Arcade Fire, Will wrote the songs for David Adjmi's play about a 1970s band. It won Best Play in 2024, and he was nominated for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.