Arcade Fire Drop New Single, ‘The Lightning I, II’; New Album Due in May

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorNearly five years after the release of their last album, “Everything Now,” the sixth studio album by Arcade Fire, has been confirmed for a May 6, 2022 release via Columbia Records.Titled ‘We,’ the album’s arrival is preceded by first single “The Lightning I, II,” and as a video directed by Emily Kai Bock, which can be seen below.Produced by longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich with the group’s Win Butler and & Régine Chassagne, and recorded in multiple locales including New Orleans, El Paso and Mount Desert Island, the album “paradoxically distills ‘the longest we’ve ever spent writing, uninterrupted, probably ever’ (per the band’s Win Butler) into a concise 40 minute epic – one as much about the forces that threaten to pull us away from the people we love, as it is inspired by the urgent need to overcome them,” the announcement reads. “‘We’s cathartic journey follows a definable arc from darkness into light over the course of seven songs divided into two distinct sides — Side ‘I’ channeling the fear and loneliness of isolation, and Side ‘We’ expressing the joy and power of reconnection: ‘I’Age of Anxiety I
Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)
End of the Empire I-IV‘WE’The Lightning I, II
Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)
Unconditional II (Race and Religion) 
WE.”The song six-plus-minute song seems to address that dichotomy: As the title indicates, it is divided into two dramatically different segments and is essentially two different songs — the opening half is a slower, sweeping, cinematic, almost Springsteenesque anthem, while the second part drastically ups the tempo and is an exhilarating burst.On the album’s cover (above), a photograph of a human eye by the artist JR evokes Sagittarius.