Arcade Fire Plan New Album by End of Next Year

Arcade Fire are hard at work on the follow up 2010's The Suburbs, which the band hopes to have ready by  he end of next year, drummer Jeremy Gara told Ottawa radio station CKCU in a 25-minute interview today.

"We are just working like we always have," said Gara. "We took a couple months off and we've been writing songs. Now we're in the studio pretty much full time just doing what we do. And we kind of shut the door. We haven't really gone out and done anything in over a year now. We haven't done photos or interviews or anything. We're just working on music and growing beards and living at home a lot and going out to dinner together."

Gara went on to say that the band is taking their time, noting that Arcade Fire work at their own pace with no firm deadlines from managers or their label. "We're not that far into a record, but we've been working for a few months now," he said. 

While Gara joked that the only way the band could follow up the whopping success of The Suburbs was with "a fourth album collapse," he said the awards and accolades – including a Grammy for Album of the Year – have not fazed Arcade Fire. "It was pretty easy to be like, 'That was incredible, that was super weird – now let's go back to what we do,"' he said. 

With the band's growing stadium-sized status, Gara said the musicians are thinking about how they might toy with their live performances to make them spectacles on the order of Coldplay or Bruce Springsteen. "We don't hand off all that work, we really want to stay engaged in all the facets of what we're doing," he said. 

Gara also added that band has been working in a new recording space that's coming together as they record, a move prompted by a collapsing roof at the church that housed their old studio. Violin maestro Owen Pallett has also recently used the new space.