The Arcade Fire

The Arcade Fire started in Montreal in 2001, when friends and classmates Win Butler and Josh Deu decided to form a band, with Régine Chassagne alongside Butler from the very beginning. The early lineup kept changing, but Richard Reed Parry, Will Butler and Tim Kingsbury soon joined the core, with violinists Sarah Neufeld and Owen Pallett among the regular contributors. An EP came out in 2003.

Funeral, released in 2004, is the record that put them on the map, and critics rank it among the very best albums of the decade. It sounds like a marching band, a church choir and an indie-rock group all trying to fit through the same door: accordion, hurdy-gurdy, xylophone, violins and drums piling up into huge, cathartic crescendos, with Butler and Chassagne both singing lead. "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" charges ahead at a gallop, "Rebellion (Lies)" pounds away relentlessly, and "Wake Up" swells into a mass sing-along. On stage the multi-instrumentalists swap duties from song to song and seem to haul the whole orchestra along with them.

Neon Bible, in 2007, the year of "Keep the Car Running", picked up the Juno for Alternative Album of the Year and the Meteor Music Award for Best International Album. The Suburbs, in 2010, went further still, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year, the Juno for Album of the Year and the Brit Award for Best International Album, with "Ready to Start", "We Used to Wait" and the title track all from that year. The Junos named them Group of the Year in 2011.

Reflektor followed in 2013, and the same year they scored the film Her, earning Pallett and Will Butler an Academy Award nomination. Everything Now came in 2017 and WE in 2022, by which point Will Butler had left, with Pink Elephant arriving in 2025. Every album from Funeral to WE was nominated for the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, and three of them made the Polaris Music Prize shortlist.

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