Arcade Fire Defend The 'Burbs

“You can put negative connotations on anything, but I think the thing about when you grow up in the suburbs is you have to make your own artistic culture,” says drummer Jeremy Gara, adding, “The nice thing is, the community we’re part of in Montreal is so musical. Basically everyone who lives in Montreal is doing something extremely creative. We’re all between 25 and 35, so everyone that we know here is really just locking into something great –so when we get home it’s easy to jump back into our community. The end of all the phases of the Neon Bible tour … it was a huge relief to tap back into normal life in Montreal. The pace of things is really easy, there’s little to no big rock band stuff.”

Jeremy also admits that “My Bloody Valentine and The Cure were the first bands that I didn’t hear on the radio that blew my mind.”

As for putting together the new album, he explains, “we just got together in Win and Regine’s living room for a long time, and then we’d go to a cottage and bring drums and a couple of keyboards and guitars, and that is truly how this record started. We were just like, ‘Let’s keep it as simple as possible’. Even the sheer fact that the room we were playing in was so small: ‘We can’t bring in the weird pipe organ sample thing! Leave that outside!’ We really just wanted to be in a band without the trappings of being, like, a megaband. I think some of the subtlety comes from that.”

Read the full interview with Arcade Fire in Hot Press, out on Thursday July 15.