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11:41 · 1,767 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The record starts with a trip to Haiti, where Regine Chassagne's family home is, and the band joining Rara, the week-long festival before Easter with its paper-mache masks, drums, tin trumpets and bamboo horns.
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- They spent four days jamming with Haitian drummers, looped the recordings, and brought Haitian congo players in to record and tour with the band.
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- By late 2012 they took 60 song ideas to Jamaica, rented an abandoned castle, and brought in James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem to co-produce most of it.
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- The title comes from Kierkegaard's 1846 essay The Present Age, which describes a reflective era with endless talk and no action, where nothing significant happens but everything is instantly publicised.
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- Arcade Fire had already written about screens on Neon Bible, and this record extends that into the argument that the tool built to connect people became the barrier between them.
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- The other Kierkegaard idea the album runs on is identity by imitation, people becoming mirrors of each other, so the culture turns into a reflection of a reflection with no original left.
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- Two songs test that directly, one on what it costs to pass as normal and one on a queer person rejected by family, which is the album's clearest statement of the theme.
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- Joan of Arc enters as the counter-example, a peasant girl who refused the norms of gender, class and status and became a saint, exactly the kind of action Kierkegaard said his age lacked.
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- The cover is Rodin's Orpheus and Eurydice, and two consecutive tracks on the second disc carry the lovers' names, which sets up the myth as the album's second spine.
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- The conclusion inverts the myth's failure: Orpheus loses her, but he acted, which is precisely what the reflective age cannot manage, so failing passionately is the record's recommendation.
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