We
| Arcade Fire
We
We (stylized as WE or "WE") is the sixth studio album by Canadian indie rock band Arcade Fire, released on May 6, 2022, through Columbia Records. Produced by Nigel Godrich and band members Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, the album was recorded in New Orleans; El Paso, Texas; and Mount Desert Island in Maine. The album takes its name from the Russian dystopian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It is the final album to feature multi-instrumentalist Will Butler, who departed the band in 2021 shortly after its completion. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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PopMatters
Somehow, Arcade Fire have created an album that’s one half an exciting return to form and the other a continuation of their worst impulses with WE.
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Pitchfork
The band’s sixth album pivots back to a more melodic, sincere, and effortful style, attempting once again to find a genuine connection.
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Variety
Arcade Fire’s ‘We’ Marks a Welcome Return to Band’s Trademark Apocalyptic Good Cheer.
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Rolling Stone
Their first album in in five years sounds like a band circling the wagons.
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The New York Times
The band’s sixth album, “We,” shares many of its predecessor’s thematic fixations on dangerous digital rabbit holes. The music sometimes can’t find its way out, either.
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Slate
While Arcade Fire may not excel as sociological songwriters, the second half of We, like all their best music, shows they already know the way out of these cycles, which is to sing as openly as they can to and about each other. The rest will speak for itself. Well, that and: Please, at long last, could Régine sing lead on a few more songs per album? At those moments, I always readily surrender my will, as well as my won’t.
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NME
Canadian collective’s most focussed record since ‘The Suburbs’.
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Treblezine
With old modes of feeling irrevocably broken, or at least tired by now, it’s “WE” that offers a kind of new way forward for Arcade Fire to keep on: humbly posted in awe, staring into the void at the edge of everything.
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Paste Magazine
Win Butler and Régine Chassagne’s songwriting is the most heartfelt it’s been in over a decade.
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The Guardian
Beauty, bleakness and euphoria collide on this record of two halves.
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Louder Than War
Arcade Fire’s sixth album attempts to balance the disquiet and division of the modern world with love and hope. And though occasionally uneven, it ultimately reminds us that they are at their best when unpicking the deeper truths of the human experience
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Slant Magazine
Economical hooks and ironic distance have been supplanted by a return to grandiose multi-part suites and painful sincerity.
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The Irish Times
A welcome return to what they do best.
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XS Noize
Arcade Fire has produced another worthy addition to their stellar discography in WE. Fans will love the veterans of alternative music’s latest revelation. WE is cathartic and soul-cleansing; listeners will find themselves nodding in agreement while dancing. The album provides us with an acknowledgement of what we have been through and then looks to inspire us with an image of what we have the potential to become.
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mxdwn Music
With every moment of the acoustic guitar, there is a sense of intimacy beyond the hopelessness. In all of the decay of the world, there is still meaning. And perhaps now, more than ever, these songs are needed to show that life will go on. “We” will be able to find meaning in life.
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Consequence
The indie collective's sixth studio album is their most ambitious yet.
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Beats Per Minute
To be fair, I’m happy the zombified corpse that was Everything Now has been dispersed with, and WE is no necromancy even if it isn’t as vividly alive as Reflektor was. But it’s uneven, uncertain, even uncharismatic in some places. It’s retreading old ground and shouting at clouds, but also genuine and at times beautiful in its crystalline synth-pop nostalgia. But in too many places it feels like the band has become all too much like the city structures in WE, the book: a glass labyrinth, where every wall is translucent, where everything is prescribed, where there’s no alarms and no surprises.
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Loud and Quiet
The world has changed in countless ways since Arcade Fire first emerged in 2004 and at various points on WE the band feel at risk of being left behind, or worse, trying to hard to keep up. At its best though, WE reminds listeners what made this group the indie giants that they are and even makes a case that for all our irony-fuelled nihilism, a little earnestness, and perhaps even hope, aren’t always such a bad thing.
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Riff Magazine
Arcade Fire returns with terse, tense, touching ‘WE’.
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The Bookish Mutant
WE is, without a doubt, high in the ranks of my favorite albums of 2022 so far—timely, but still rife with the infectious joy that makes me love Arcade Fire as much as I do.
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Square One Magazine
Arcade Fire could have used this ever changing world and the ever-shifting idea of what “normal” is — both in the music and non-music world — as a vehicle to change their sound completely. There are glimpses of a change in their movement towards dance and dance-pop but, at face value, this is an Arcade Fire record. It might be their shortest offering but it proves their most impactful, as listeners don’t have to make their way through filler tracks but straight to Arcade Fire at its core: thoughtful songs that encourage moments of pondering, singalong and a sense of togetherness which never goes amiss.
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DIY Magazine
Even in the comforting message of ‘Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)’ (“Look out kid, trust your heart / You don’t have to play the part / They wrote for you”) written for Win Butler and Régine Chassagne’s son, it’s clear that these songs have a real and sincere heart, designed to both stir and soothe the soul in one fell swoop.
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Glide Magazine
As a whole, WE is a fairly good album and would be better received if it wasn’t an Arcade Fire album. The success of their first three albums definitely puts added pressure on the group and they might never live up to the expectations of their fans moving forward. Snagging Nigel Godrich as a producer for WE was a smart move as the album feels more layered than their past few albums and he may have had an influence on getting them “back to roots”.
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Renowned For Sound
WE is an album that can be split in two. The first half is anxiety; it’s hiding away and sheltering yourself from the outside world. The second half is about realising that things are going to be ok. WE treads the line between being quiet and loud. It’s a reassuring message, one that only Arcade Fire can deliver. And as with all Arcade Fire’s albums, I’m sure WE will take on a new meaning in their spectacular live shows (take my pretentious word for it, they are incredible).
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Belwood Music
WE rarely reaches up to the heights of anthemic glamour that constitutes their biggest hits, but as an album it maintains a high bar of quality that gives their very best records a run for their money. It’s not quite a dramatic comeback, not quite a reinvention, not quite a nostalgic culmination of past sounds – but I can definitely say it’s one of the most fantastic albums of the year. A future classic, and another feather in the cap of a band whose premature demise had been grossly exaggerated.
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Fatherly
The New Arcade Fire Is a Perfect Bittersweet Catharsis For Parents Everywhere.
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Spin
We succeeds in its exploration of what feels like a well-shared generational philosophy: Even if “we” as a country are totally screwed, “we” in the much more granular sense — spouses, children, circles of friends — remain the light in the darkness, the reason to keep going.
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Stereogum
On their raw, explosive, overwhelming debut, this band harnessed an unrepeatable ecstatic energy. They then spent almost two decades challenging themselves to grow and change, a process that has worked out pretty well for the most part. Still, ever since Funeral lit my soul on fire in 2004, I’ve been waiting on another Arcade Fire album that elicited such unreserved passion, that wasn’t at least a little bit disappointing. After nearly two decades waiting on the lightning, that album is finally here.
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Our Culture
WE doesn’t go out of its way to blindly recreate any of the band’s eras. Rather than recycling the technological dread that informed their recent work, it gets to the core of that anxiety, then traces a path towards optimism. ‘Unconditional II (Race and Religion)’, a propulsive electro cut that features guest vocals from Peter Gabriel, is another straightforward song about an all-consuming feeling – but this time it’s utter devotion, and the payoff is a lot bigger. Arcade Fire songs tend to build and build and build, but WE is a record about rebuilding what’s lost – one that allows itself to breathe before the catharsis arrives, even with the knowledge that it never might. Ultimately, it makes sense that the closing title track is a gentle acoustic ballad that’s full of hope yet leaves you wanting more. “I am awaiting/ perpetually and forever/ a renaissance of wonder,” go the final lines of the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem that inspired the ‘Age of Anxiety’ suite. You can call WE a rebirth, but Arcade Fire still revel in the waiting.
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The Ringer
With ‘WE,’ the Montreal-born collective’s sixth and latest record, Arcade Fire has shed the baggage of their recent missteps and delivered a wide-eyed, cathartic mission statement.
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Uncut
Like Spoon with Lucifer On The Sofa and Animal Collective with Time Skiffs, Arcade Fire have delivered a triumphant restatement of purpose that 2022 probably doesn’t deserve but is brightened by all the same. So best enjoy this age of wonder while it lasts.
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Spectrum Culture
This sixth album finds Arcade Fire at a crossroads, and it doesn’t give a real indication of what path they want to follow.
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The Fire Note
the album’s songs, melodies, lyrics and overall musicality resonated more deeply, and I recalled the warmth I felt listening to “The Suburbs” when it was brand new, and I didn’t think anybody knew about it but me. Arcade Fire belongs to a larger part of the populace these days, but We finds them a lot closer to home.
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Northern Transmissions
The new Arcade Fire album is something that music fans eagerly await and after the last couple of years, and the continuing stress we are still going through, WE has come out at the perfect time. A meditation on the modern age that is so earnest but doesn’t feel cheesy. It all feels very real and still weirdly hopeful. Something we may all look back on and realize how much it helped us all to understand, recognize and negotiate the complex emotions we are all dealing with today.
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Gigwise
WE is an album full of love. It’s full of heart, passion and soul. At just 40 minutes, it’s their most concise album, but not a second has been wasted. It’s endearingly earnest in a way Arcade Fire haven’t allowed themselves to be since 2013, and will go onto become another one of their critically-acclaimed gems. The title track and album closer sums it all up perfectly, taking all the dread of the first half and exorcising it gently. Cathartic and melodic, healing and growing. The journey is complete, and yet your answer to Butler’s final question of “when everything ends, can we do it again?” is an immediate “yes”. We needed this.
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Exclaim!
Nothing here quite scratches the itch of both emotional catharsis and rapturous splendour the way Arcade Fire's best songs do, but after a few initial attempts at capturing our collective panic and frustration, they have finally managed to pull it off by seeing themselves as part of the problem, by putting themselves in the line of fire, and by sharing the coping strategies and counterarguments that get them through and putting them into song. That's what Arcade Fire have been about since the very beginning, and it's a relief that they've remembered to do that once again.
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The Line of Best Fit
WE is a product of troubled times, motivated by lived experience rather than the abstract. The title track fittingly closes with a stylistic full circle reversion to origins, Arcade Fire reinstating the defining shades of their career through a precise and purposeful sequence of tracks – an ouroboros-like reawakening that finds them at their acerbic and celebratory best.
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Sputnik Music
I guess I'm becoming an elder millennial for holding a modern band to their standards whenever I grew up with them juxtaposed to how they are now, but I know they were better, I swear they were better at one point in time.
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The Skinny
Arcade Fire’s WE is marked as a return from the depths of their career monstrosity Everything Now – unfortunately, it's anything but.
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Music Scene Media
Arcade Fire’s album WE was a pleasant surprise. As a long-time Arcade Fire fan who first fell in love with their music during the release of their iconic album The Suburbs in 2010, it is lovely to hear new music from them once more. Despite the idiosyncratic lyrical choices that weighed down some of their new songs for me, I thoroughly enjoyed their newest addition to their musical collection.
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Epigram
With these positives said though, I’m afraid I must return to the glaring fact that this is Arcade Fire’s most disappointing release. Dominated by overproduced and I’ll formed tracks, the only thing that WE has done for me is make me nostalgic for the Band’s early discography. I find myself howling for authentic Arcade Fire, and my call has not been answered in a very long time.
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Picky Bastards
Arcade Fire remain a Sphinx; early reviews suggest that this record will be seen through an array of personal prisms that colour how it is received. Parents who love the band are going to be singing the clap-along jam “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” to their children; critics of the band will find it unimaginably corny. Both are probably right – Arcade Fire at their best requires skin in the game, complete and utter emotional buy-in. They give you back what you give them, and WE keeps rewarding that faith.
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Brooklyn Vegan
Arcade Fire’s ‘WE’ is a satisfying rebirth.
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Stereoboard
Our need for new, brilliant music from a band capable of such things, though, has been quenched. ‘We’ is not so much (dare we say it) a return to form, but a reminder of Arcade Fire’s strength and the appeal that made us fall in love with them in the first place—unconditionally, of course.
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Evening Standard
No better soundtrack for the apocalypse.
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The Upcoming
We is undoubtedly the Montreal band’s best album in years. Nearly 20 years on from their stellar debut Funeral, in the era of Spotify playlists and music tastes being dictated by way of algorithm, Arcade Fire continue to make the best case for the concept studio album and set the bar for what modern indie can be.
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AllMusic
While not as immediately accessible as the all-star run of their first three albums, WE will at least be a course-corrector for fans still alienated by Everything Now and the underrated Reflektor, a satisfying journey that realigns the band's heart and soul.
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Cult MTL
The band’s shortest album still manages to feel epic, and that’s Arcade Fire’s specialty.
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Weise Words
I don’t think WE has the staying power of the earlier work of Arcade Fire, but I am really satisfied with the comeback that it gives us. I liken it to The Strokes’ comeback with The New Abnormal. It wasn’t Is This It (Because no album ever will be), but it was a damn good return after a long hiatus and I will definitely continue to re-visit.
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SFR
Five years later, Arcade Fire is back with their latest album, WE. It continues their progression/style of rock and roll that slowly builds to a crescendo. It’s the type of album that you shut out the world and put noise-canceling headphones on to listen to from start to finish.
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Why Now
Arcade Fire don’t lack ambition. The band’s new album, WE, explores weighty topics across varied production, with more direction than any of their albums since 2010’s The Suburbs. Still, and despite standouts, it’s just ever so slightly ‘eh’.
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musicOMH
Crystallises just what makes these Canadians so great: when they hit the mark, there’s nobody to touch them.
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Bearded Gentlemen Music
This album’s beyond a pleasure to listen to; I believe it has the ability to take you somewhere, teach you things about yourself you may not have realized, and better you. Listen closely. After successfully releasing a bold and haunting fourth album, I’m confident that wherever their next steps may lead them, I’ll want to follow.
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Montreal Gazette
The Montreal-born rock band has never lacked ambition, and that continues to be the case, two decades into a remarkable career.
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The indiecator
One of the great things about WE is that fans of Arcade Fire’s earlier work can hail it as a “return to form,” while newer fans could argue it’s just the band continuing their synthpop trend, and both would be correct. It has something to please everyone, and most importantly, doesn’t shortchange one style at the expense of another. This doesn’t mean that every song is a knockout, since Arcade Fire still throw in some clumsy lyrics on WE, and the band should probably steer clear from technology-centric social commentary for a while. Regardless, if you jumped off the Arcade Fire bandwagon in the 2010s, now would be a good time to jump back on.
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No Ripcord
WE displays an alternate path to where the band could have gone immediately after Reflektor. It takes that album’s sense of adventure, experimentation, dance influences, and catharsis, and expands on it while also mining their classic sound. There’s lots to love but WE can’t match the power of the band’s first four records. Still, Arcade Fire’s returned rejuvenated after time in a cynical wilderness, ready to sing and dance against apathy. This album is worth it for that fact alone.
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Analog Planet
Calculated & Concise, But Inconsistent.
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The Arts Desk
Canadian indie rock giant's lockdown album is heartfelt and imaginative.
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Flood Magazine
This sixth album often finds a veteran band charging atop vigorous, surging melodies and not being afraid to just lean into the groove again.
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ATL
Across its forty minutes, WE has dipped its toes into the past, present and future of Arcade Fire to create a compelling record which should be mentioned in the same conversations as Funeral and The Suburbs. Previous album Everything Now had its qualities (and its flaws), but WE absolutely puts it to shame. Five years is a long time, and despite everything which has gone on these last few years it hasn’t prevented Arcade Fire from making an absolutely stunning record. In fact, the events of the last few years have made this album the sonic and lyrical masterpiece that it is. Nigel Godrich’s involvement as producer also should not be underestimated here; he’s helped Arcade Fire regain their spark. Music which makes you think, yet also dance – that’s WE.
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The Times
The album combines originality and sophistication with mass appeal — not an easy trick to pull off.
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