The Suburbs by The Arcade Fire

The Suburbs, Arcade Fire's third album, came out on Merge in 2010, and the Montreal band made it sound both enormous and intimate, a record that sprawls like the landscape its title names. Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, Richard Reed Parry, Will Butler, Tim Kingsbury and Jeremy Gara were all in the band by then, with Sarah Neufeld on violin, and this is a band of multi-instrumentalists who pile on everything in reach.

It's indie rock with an art-rock brain and a baroque-pop heart. "Ready to Start" rattles and surges with a nervy, propulsive drive; the title track bounces along on a jaunty piano that can't quite hide its melancholy; "We Used to Wait" builds from a slow tick into something wide-open and yearning; "Month of May" is a blast of scrappy, breakneck energy; and "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" glitters like a disco ball hanging in an empty mall. The title track and "Month of May" came out together on a limited-edition 12-inch when the album was announced.

It debuted at number one in Canada, the US, the UK and Ireland, then collected a haul of 2011 prizes: Album of the Year at the Grammys and at the Junos, Best International Album at the Brits, and the Polaris Music Prize. The Grammy win gave it a second wind, too: two weeks later it leapt up the Billboard 200 from No. 52 to No. 12. A deluxe edition in 2011 added "Culture War", "Speaking in Tongues" with David Byrne, and Spike Jonze's short film Scenes from the Suburbs.

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