Arcade Fire at Metro
photo by Brigid Gallagher

Win Butler's written "two or three" Arcade Fire albums in COVID lockdown

Back in September, Arcade Fire‘s Will Butler said that the band was “not behind schedule” when it came to work on their next album, the follow up to 2017’s Everything Now, but that, with coronavirus keeping them from getting together, “it’s a bit of a question mark” when work would progress. Now Will’s brother, frontman Win Butler, has appeared on the Broken Record podcast, and, speaking to Rick Rubin, he said he’s been writing a ton of new material, enough for “two or three” albums, during coronavirus lockdown, and they plan to go “back to Texas to make the next record, during the election – so that’ll be fun.”

“Once your body’s already going, there’s no stopping it, so I’ve just been writing,” Win said. “I can’t remember a time when I’ve written more. Feels like being 18, just sitting at a piano for five days in a row just working on a melody for a verse.”

“This time around we’ve been in lockdown, [we] have a studio, have every keyboard, drum machine, piano – everything I could want – and fucking time,” he continued. “The one piece that’s been missing [on previous albums] is the time, and now the time is there.”

“What would you want our record to sound like?” Win asked Rubin at one point. He answered, “I want to be surprised. It’s always good to be surprised. I like to be surprised.” “I think you’ll be surprised,” Win responded.

Listen to the podcast in full below.