Watch: Arcade Fire's Spike Jonze-Directed Video for 'The Suburbs'

Thursday night the "secret film project" that Arcade Fire and director Spike Jonze have been working on for months was revealed to be a video for the title track of the band's latest LP, The Suburbs. It's a startlingly literal vision of the dystopian suburbs depicted in the song's lyrics ("You always seemed so sure/ That one day we'd be fighting in a suburban war").

The clip starts off with idyllic scenes of young friends getting up to teen mischief in the suburbs. But darker imagery — people being arrested, heavily armed soldiers — quickly starts appearing. And when night falls, things get really dark: Martial law is apparently declared and black-masked soldiers move in. Some of the kids are arrested and carted off, and the clip ends with another being beaten savagely in a fast-food joint.

The band's Win Butler spoke with Pitchfork about the clip over the summer, and while he described it as a "science-fiction B-movie companion piece for the record," he didn't hint at its grim and violent nature.

"It was great just hanging out with these 15-year-olds for a week and writing down all the funny things they said," he said. "It was cool to revert to being a 15-year-old for a little while."

Watch: Arcade Fire and Spike Jonze's video for "The Suburbs" [Consequence of Sound]

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Song Stories

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz | 2008

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."

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