Funeral by The Arcade Fire

Funeral, the debut album from Canadian band Arcade Fire, came out on Merge Records on September 14, 2004, and it sounds like a whole neighborhood crying and dancing at the same wake. The band produced it themselves. They laid down the first recordings over a single week in August 2003 at the Hotel2Tango in Montreal and finished it later that year, all of it on analogue tape.

Death hangs over everything: several of the band members lost relatives while the record was being made, and the songs circle mortality, change and the end of childhood innocence. The first half, the "Neighborhood" songs, imagines a town stuck in a winter power cut, drawn from living through the North American ice storm of 1998. Win Butler and Régine Chassagne lead the charge, with Richard Reed Parry, Will Butler and Tim Kingsbury piling on guitars, keyboards, basses and whatever else is lying around, Howard Bilerman on drums, and Sarah Neufeld and Owen Pallett sawing away on violins. "Wake Up" swells into a stadium-sized singalong, "Rebellion (Lies)" pounds forward on a heartbeat pulse, and "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" is pure, joyful panic.

Of the five singles, "Rebellion (Lies)" did best, reaching 19 in Britain. The album picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album in 2005, landed on year-end and decade-end lists everywhere, and according to Metacritic only Radiohead's Kid A turned up more often on the best-of-the-decade lists.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.