Arcade Fire Share New Single That’s ‘a Lullaby for the End Times’

Ahead of their new album WE, Arcade Fire have shared the LP’s latest single “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid).”

The band previously premiered the track onstage during their New York residency as well as during their surprise set at Coachella, where frontman Win Butler got so emotional performing the track that Arcade Fire had to stop and start again after he composed himself.

“There’s nothing saccharine about unconditional love in a world that is coming apart at the seams,” Butler said of the single in a statement. “We need each other, in all of our imperfection. ‘Lookout Kid’ is a reminder, a lullaby for the end times, sung to my son, but for everyone… Trust your heart, trust your mind, trust your body, trust your soul. Shit is going to get worse before it gets better, but it always gets better, and no one’s perfect. Let me say it again. No one’s perfect.”

We arrives May 6 via Columbia Records; the following day, the band will serve as musical guests on the May 7 episode of Saturday Night Live.

The album was produced by longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich along with Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne. The LP was recorded at studios in New Orleans, El Paso, and Mount Desert Island, Maine, in mid-2021 following a pandemic period that marked “the longest we’ve ever spent writing, uninterrupted, probably ever,” Butler said in a statement.

The album borrows its title from Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 sci-fi novel We, which would later inspire the dystopian works of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. 

The seven-song LP — which features guests Peter Gabriel and Father John Misty, and marks longtime member Will Butler’s final album with the band — is split across two sides, “I” and “We,” respectively, with the first half exploring loneliness and isolation and the latter part celebrating reconnection.